My 3 Day Week in Review

A little late this week due to the epic Lost finale last night...

Fundraising

As I mentioned in my Week in Review post last Monday, I finally got my fundraising letters in the mail.  The response to those letters (and emails and Facebook mentions...) hasn't been quite what I was hoping for, but it did generate six donations last week totaling $251.  That puts my overall fundraising total at $2051 - only $249 left to go!  

While I am currently focused on just getting to my fundraising minimum, my ultimate goal is actually to raise quite a bit more than that before the Boston 3 Day in July.  However, I have some teammates who need to reach their personal minimums before they can complete online check in.  Since we would like to tent together, that means we only have one month left to get everyone to the $2300 minimum.  That being the case, I am hoping to reach my personal minimum by the end of this week and then shift my focus wholly to getting the other girls to their fundraising minimums.  Once we achieve that, Relentless Optimism will then work together to reach our team goal of $20,000 before the event, something I definitely think we can achieve.  We just have to reach the other milestones along the way, the first of which for me is reaching my minimum.  If you would like to help me reach my goal this week, you can make a donation to the 3 Day here.

Special thanks to my new donors this week:  Hannah Martin (who I mentioned last Monday since she snuck in right before I posted my Week in Review), Brian Ciliax, Marla Gearing, William Perry, Diana Moreland (one of the Mag Moms!), and Chris and Sheila Warne.  Thank you everyone helping me to get that much closer to my goal!

Training

I wasn't the best at training this week, although I somewhat made up for it on Sunday.  For some reason, the mileage I had in my head from the training schedule for this week was totally off, so I ended up quite a bit short on two of my training walks.  I was going to balance things out on Friday during a planned training walk with Julie and Val of the Two Pink Chicks Fo(u)r Boobs team but we had to cancel due to thunderstorms.  I was really bummed about having to cancel because I was really looking forward to showing the ladies around Midtown Atlanta.  To make up for being a slacker walker this week, I decided to really push myself on Sunday and walked 17.5 miles in 4 hours and 24 minutes.  I felt really great during the whole walk, with nary a blister or hot spot in sight.  I wasn't even all that sore, last night or this morning.  Perhaps there is something to this cross training thing after all...

All told, even with my super long walk on Sunday, I only covered 28.7 miles last week, which is 4.3 miles short of the recommended total distance for Week 10.  I will be making those miles up this week though, mostly because I hate feeling behind on things.  Call it "Walker's Guilt" or something.  I have now walked 338.73 miles to date since I started training for the 2010 3 Day event.

I also jumped back into running this week in order to start stretching myself out for the 10K Peachtree Road Race on July 4th.  I ran a total of 8.6 miles and generally felt pretty awesome on all three runs.  I'm still having to walk off and on throughout each run, but I can tell that I'm getting stronger.  That first interval keeps getting longer and I'm recovering from each interval faster, which is exactly the plan.

Extra Stuff

Not too many extra 3 Day activities this week, especially on my blog.  I was able to make it up to the 2 Pink Chicks "Pottery for a Cure" fundraiser on Thursday night which was a lot of fun.  I finally got to meet Julie's teammate Val who was in town for the weekend.  I also got to meet Heidi (who writes the blog A Life Changing Journey) after somehow missing her at the Atlanta Training Kick Off event a couple weeks ago.  It was really great to be able to support other 3 Day walkers in person since my own teammates are scattered all over the East Coast.  I do want to apologize to the girls, though, because I was totally frazzled when I got there (I was running late as usual...) and I don't think I was as friendly as I could have been.  I did have an absolutely great time at the event though and I loved meeting all of you!

Coming Up Next Week...

As I mentioned in the fundraising section above, it is truly crunch time for our team for fundraising.  I am going to be working hard on a number of fronts to really help drum up donations both to get me to my minimum by the end of this week and to raise money for my teammates as well.  Our Tastefully Simple sale is still ongoing, so I will be continuing to promote that hard on Facebook, Twitter and through email.  Another of our teammates, Sharon, has what sounds like an incredible event planned at a club in Florida coming up this Friday that I'm also going to be helping her promote.  On top of that, I'm going to be putting together another fundraising letter that we can use next weekend to start to approach some of the local businesses in our home town about sponsoring us.  So there are lots of irons in the Relentless Optimism fundraising fire this week!

Training is going to be a bit different this week as well because I'm going to be traveling up to New York for a family reunion over Memorial Day weekend.  Because I don't want to spend my entire trip out training, I am going to swap the recommended weekend mileage for Week 9 (this week) with Week 8 (next week) since Week 8 is a recovery week and the mileage is significantly shorter than for Week 9.  That means I will only have one relatively short walk to complete on my trip and three walks during the week.  I am also going to tack a mile or two onto each planned walk to make up those four missed miles from last week.  I am also hoping to squeeze in three runs this week as well, following the recommended mileage for Week 3 from this 10K training plan.  It's going to be an intense week to get all of that in, but sometimes, that's just what it takes.  My awesome family is planning to walk with me on Sunday in New York and I'm really looking forward to showing them just what goes into training for the 3 Day after all these years.  Not all of them will be able to walk the whole distance, so they're planning to each walk a couple of miles with me, relay-style, instead.  I just love that I have that kind of support from my family and I can't wait!

Finally, with only nine weeks left until the Boston 3 Day (!!!!!), I've decided to plot out what I want to cover on my blog in the weeks ahead.  I've got a lot of great things planned and I WILL follow through with them, I promise.  I'm going to start this week with a post all about fundraising letters and I'll move on from there.  I've also got a rather epic sock review coming up, although I still have at least another week of sock testing before I get to that post.  Lots of great content in the weeks ahead as the Boston 3 Day comes ever closer!