My Belated 3 Day Week in Review!

Real life was a bit more intense this week, so my Breast Cancer 3 Day activities were pretty limited.  Nonetheless, a week in review it is!

Fundraising

This week I took some time off and didn't really do anything for fundraising.  My fundraising total did manage to grow some this week and is currently at an even $1800 thanks to two donations.  First, the check I've been going on about from my Relentless Optimism teammate Michelle finally posted to my 3 Day account.  I also received a donation from my colleague Lindsey here at Emory which was a nice surprise.  So thank you very much Michelle and Lindsey for keeping my fundraising moving while I was busy doing other things!

Training

Training this week was interesting to say the least.  We've had storms rolling through the area since last Tuesday, meaning that any attempt to make any plans went out the door. Tuesday was especially crazy. Usually on Tuesdays, I walk three miles then go for a run.  This past Tuesday, I got about a mile and half into my walk only to have the sky open up on me and poor, terrified Shenanigans. Pouring rain, hail, thunder, lightening... you name it.  So we ran to the closest shelter I could find (a public restroom near the pool at Piedmont Park) and hid until the rain stopped.  That's Shenans hiding for dear life during the storm in the picture on the right.  I thought the storm had passed, so we continued on our walk.  Sure enough, not even 1/2 mile later, more crazy rain.  This time we ended up hanging out at Park Tavern until the rain passed.  At that point, I decided our best bet was just to run the rest of the way home and figure out the miles that I covered later on.  However, by the time we got home, it was sunny and beautiful.  Plus, I felt great running, so we just kept going!  In the end, we completed all of the miles I had planned to cover but we ran a much greater percentage of the route than I expected to!   All told, we ran ~ 4.1 miles out of the 5.6 total miles that we did that day, including 2.13 miles at our longest continuous interval.  That's by far the furthest I've ever run without stopping.  So moral of the story: pay attention to the weather forecast before you leave and if you do get caught in the rain, you might get an awesome run out of it.

The rest of the week, I was able to plan well enough to avoid getting caught in the rain but I still had to flip things around to get in all my training walks and runs.  The highlight of my training this week by far was the Atlanta 3 Day Training Kick Off event on Saturday morning.  You can read all about that and see my pictures here.  All together, I walked 23.9 miles this week and ran an additional 10.1 miles for a nice round total of 34 miles covered.  That puts me at 246.6 miles walked to date and 57.2 miles run.  Feeling good!

Extra Stuff

Aack!  I didn't do anything extra related to the 3 Day this week besides attending the Training Kick Off!

Coming Up Next Week

So as you can tell from this update, this past week was very busy for me on the non - 3 Day side of things.  That's going to happen time to time, because my first priority has to be finishing grad school.  Other than not being there for my teammates as I would have liked to be, it's not the end of the world to take a break for a few weeks.  However, when I received my Virtual Personal Trainer on Friday morning and saw that there are only 12 weeks left until the Boston 3 Day, I was shocked!  That's not much time at all and I still have so much to do, especially on the fundraising front.  So this week, despite having an important presentation on Thursday morning, I am recommitting to my 3 Day activities!

While I would love to jump into planning a somewhat larger fundraising event, I think the most important thing for me to do on the fundraising front is to send out my formal fundraising letters.  In the past, I've had an incredible response to a simple letter writing campaign and I expect nothing less this year.  However, people need time to respond to letters.  So this week, I am pledging to have my fundraising letters written, printed and ready to go out by the end of this week.  Once I get that done, I can turn my attention to flashier ways of raising money.  But the letters have to be first.

I'm also going to be kicking things up on the blog this week.  I've got something like 20 posts planned between this blog and our team fundraising blog, so you can expect a lot of new content soon!  I want to talk about some of the fundraising things that my teammates are doing, plus I need to introduce everyone to our new team member.  I am also going to do something I've been meaning to do for a while, which is to share my experiences from my previous 3 Days, starting with 2007.  And of course, I'll be doing something for Mother's Day both here and on the team blog.  So look for those posts this week as well.

Finally, this is one of my biggest and most important weeks for training.  So much so that I'm actually nervous about it.  That's because this Saturday is the Atlanta Race for the Cure!  I've never actually trained to run a race before, so this feels particularly huge and scary even though it's just a 5K.  Somewhere in my brain, I know I can do it.  I'm just nervous is all.  On top of that, the National Breast Cancer Network of Strength Walk to Empower is on Sunday.  I honestly have no idea what to expect at that event, but it should be a great way to mark Mother's Day for me, seeings as I won't actually be with my mom this year.  I'll be posting more about those two events later this week.  And I'll still be doing my regular 3 Day training walks this week, although it's going to take some configuring to make sure my legs aren't tired before the race on Saturday.  But I'll get it done, I know I will.  It just feels like one of those invincible weeks.

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