Well, here we go. I'm training for a half marathon over the next few months. I'm not sure what to expect. I've never run distances before, at least not past 3 miles. In fact, most exercise in general has felt more like a chore than an enjoyable experience for me. Now I've definitely pushed my body to do amazing things, but usually epidurals were involved (and no one wants to read a blog about that). Physical demands aside, I've heard that some of the biggest challenges when approaching marathons are mental; I hope that is true because I can handle that obstacle. I'm motivated by the amazing strength of my daughter.
I'm running my first (and possibly last) half-marathon to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. St. Jude is an amazing place full of hope, brilliant doctors, and cutting edge pediatric cancer treatments. It is not an exaggeration to say that their efforts saved my daughter's life when her leukemia became to difficult to treat with standard chemotherapy or a traditional transplant. My daughter Leah is back home now, but is still a current patient, as she underwent a stem cell transplant back in March. We travel to Memphis monthly for follow ups. I am happy to report that right now she has no traces of leukemia in her body and her transplant has been a success!
As for me, this year has been challenging, both mentally and physically. Facing such a difficult illness with a child is heart-wrenching. But our family is strong and we have a lot of love and a strong faith in God that helped pull us through the emotional challenges. The physical demands came back in March as I went through the donor process of harvesting the stem cells for our baby girl. It required twice daily injections of GCSF for a full week and over 14 hours of apheresis to harvest. Very painful. However, just thinking of Leah and her beautiful smile, innocence and promising future got me through. Something tells me I'll be pulling out that memory often to push me through this training.
My goal with the blog is to share our story, to help in my fundraising efforts for the most worthy cause I know, and to provide comic relief to those who know me because right now I'm definitely not much of a runner. Oh, and if I'm not posting, I'm not running... so here is one more way to hold myself accountable. I've already been told my several people that I can't do it. I'm ready to prove them wrong.
The race is on Saturday, December 3rd. My real training will start in September where I'll be following a twelve week plan to prepare that I found here: http://running.about.com/od/racetraining/a/basichalf.htm Sadly, my body isn't quite ready to start the training, so I'm doing mini-training over the next six weeks to get ready for that.
Here is the link to my fundraising page: http://www.mystjudeheroes.org/LeahsHope
And the link to our CaringBridge about Leah's journey: http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/LeahsHope
Thanks for following!
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