Fundraising
Our team continued to promote our ongoing fundraiser with Tastefully Simple this week to great success. Jen, who is our point person for this fundraiser says that we've generated almost $500 worth of sales, which should result in a nice little donation to our team at the end of this month. If you would like to support us by treating yourself to some Tastefully Simple goodies, you can find all the details about how to do so here.
My other major fundraising effort this week was FINALLY getting all of my fundraising letters. This is a much more involved process than it sounds, so getting all my letter written, printed and sent out is a huge accomplishment. All told, I put 51 letters in the mail and sent 98 emails and 142 Facebook messages today. I am hoping that this effort brings me to my fundraising minimum in the next couple weeks so that I can redirect my energies to helping raise money for my teammates. I've already gotten one donation as a result of my letters, from my friend Hannah, who also walked in the Atlanta 3 Day in 2008. Hannah's donation brings my fundraising total to $1836. Less than $500 to go!
All set up to send out those fundraising letters!
Oh, and the most exciting fundraising thing that happened this week was that my teammate Jen was the first member of our team to reach her fundraising minimum for the 3 Day! Congrats Jen!
Training
Training for the 3 Day continued to push forward while running took a bit of a backseat now that the Race for the Cure is behind me. I only ran once this week, covering 2.5 miles, in order to have a bit of "recovery" time. There was no such break from walking though. Altogether, I covered 33.3 miles walking this week, for a total of 310 miles walked to date. I also took part in my second Relay for Life event this past Friday, which you can read about here.
The biggest training challenge this week was the weather. The forecast called for thunderstorms for four solid days, starting on Saturday and ending on Tuesday - my major window for training. I thought I could get ahead of the storms by walking 13 miles at the Relay for Life on Friday night. However, the storms came through early and cut my Relay for Life walk short after just over a mile. I was pretty frustrated at that point, thinking I was going to have to dodge thunderstorms for the rest of the weekend. In the end, though, the storms stayed away and I was able to walk a solid 8 miles on Saturday out on the hiking trails at Stone Mountain with my most loyal training partner Shenanigans (pictured here on the trail) followed by another 13 miles around town with my husband (and Shenanigans of course!) on Sunday. In the end, it was definitely a successful weekend of training, even though it didn't start out that way!
Extra Stuff
I didn't do too much extra this week because all of my 3 Day time was spent working on my fundraising letter and mailing list. My team suffered a bit of a fundraising setback early in the week which really brought my spirits down. I would discuss it here, but it's still sorting itself out (I hope) and I am hopeful that everything will work out for the best. As I was reading through the 3 Day blogs this week, I noticed a number of other people were also feeling a bit frustrated with things this week. That prompted me to write this post, titled "The 3 Day is a Journey, Not a Destination" that got a ton of great feedback and really renewed my spirit as well.
I was also the recipient of a great little surprise this morning from the regional coordinator for the Breast Cancer Network of Strength, Joya. She had come across my blog and was really touched by my posts about the Walk to Empower and their organization. To thank me for helping to promote their great event, she sent me a cute little pin for my pack and two Walk to Empower t-shirts, one for me and one for my mom! I was so excited to receive this awesome gift so thank you Joya!!
Gifts from Joya at the Breast Cancer Network of Strength!
Coming Up Next Week...
Fundraising will continue to be a big focus in the week ahead. I am hoping that my letters really start to generate some donations. I will also continue to promote our Tastefully Simple fundraiser leading up to Jen's house party on Friday. I also have a few other things that I am hoping to start pursuing this week to try to net some big donations for Relentless Optimism. I am also hoping to attend the Two Pink Chicks' fundraiser on Thursday night at All Fired Up in Alpharetta. Gotta support my 3 Day sisters!
Training is also going to continue to be intense this week. The 24 week training plan for the 3 Day calls for 4 and 5 miles during the week and 14 and 10 miles on the weekend. I don't have any extra events or anything planned for this weekend, so I might try to hook up with an official training walk either at Stone Mountain or up in the 'burbs. I am also jumping into full on training to run the Peachtree Road Race, a 10K race here in Atlanta on the 4th of July. I found this great training plan for novice runners (definitely me!) that I think will work well with my walking training. It's not the most intense plan and it's not designed to train me to win the race or set a world record. However, it will give me some structure to my running to help me stretch out to 6 miles over the next seven weeks which is really what I'm looking for at this point.
Finally, I'm not even going to speculate on what I'm going to be blogging about over the next week. I've said I was going to post on a bunch of topics in the past that I've never gotten to, so we'll just see what I'm in the mood to write as the week progresses. Hopefully something helpful and/or inspirational!
Happy walking everyone!
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