Here are a few photos from our trip up to Peoria, Il. The NJCAA is having a photo contest and I submitted these today. Our guys finished 27th out of 35 teams and our girls didn’t finish last 
I started doing more of this recently — literally. I wear a heart rate monitor when I run, but until this week I’ve never based my runs on how hard my heart was working and I’ve been missing out. For me, it was all about how many miles I was (or wasn’t) running and wanting to run each run faster than the last. This worked out great initially, but then running became a chore and I began to dread the thought of running 3, 6, 8 miles… Just visualizing the same boring routes that I run was enough to make me think “I can run tomorrow”. I’ve run more miles this week because I stopped focusing on how many miles I was running, And they’ve been crazy good runs! I don’t even map out my runs before hand, I am free to just go run, which is kind of the point of running — freedom.
Maybe I should take this approach with blogging…
EDIT: I changed the title from “Listen to your Heart” to “Follow your Heart” because I’m wasn’t actually LISTENING to my heart, but taking my cues from it via a HR monitor. 
It’s 5pm, and I want nothing to do with a 3 mile run. I try to psych myself into it by envisioning my run — bad idea. All I can think about are the same boring turns, the same boring streets, the tired feeling I get towards the end. Maybe I’ll run tomorrow. No, I need to run today.
As I started the timer on my watch and took my first few steps it felt natural and effortless. It just felt right. When I started running again last April, those first few steps were painful and awkward and the only thing that kept me going was the thought “It won’t always be like this; it will only get better!” What a difference a year makes, but that mantra still holds true; I have not arrived — it only gets better.
“Discipline yourself to do the things you need to do when you need to do them, and the day will come when you will be able to do the things you want to do when you want to do them!” – Zig Ziglar
More simply put:
“Every damn day. Just do it.” – Nike T-shirt
There was no spring weather for this year’s Azalea 10k — it was down right cold. When I woke up, it was 38 degrees with windchill in the mid twenties. It warmed up to around 40 by the start of the race, but it didn’t really help. By the time it was all over I couldn’t move my thumbs which made untying and re-tying my shoe to get the chip off comical. I didn’t really think about how important my thumbs were until I was trying to do the simplest of tasks, like breaking open a banana or tearing open the wrapper for a Clif bar. All in all it was a pretty good event. I did set a new PR by nearly 3 minutes, but I was way off the mark for my optimistic “under 50 minutes”. As they say, you can’t fake a marathon — I think it applies to 10k’s too as I hadn’t put in nearly the amount of miles I needed to reach my goal. It was a small victory none the less.
There’s another 10k in Longview in June, then I’ve got my eye on the Hottest Half at Whiterock in August and maybe a full marathon by December? Not without putting in the work… I gotta get on it!