I plan to spend the last day of 2005 doing one thing I did quite a bit of this past year....running. I have signed up to run in The Great New Years Eve Race, a 5K in Stow this Saturday afternoon. My running over the last two months has been very inconsistent. I have only managed to get around one 5 mile run in most weeks. It has been hard between the move, the winter and my busy schedule. Not to mention that running on a treadmill is no fun, regardless of what is on TV or the radio. So I signed up for the race to close out my big year of running and lead into 2006, which I have big running plans for.

My main goal for now is to participate in my 2nd marathon, the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon on May 7th, 2006. I'm still deciding on my training program, but I will most likely start a 16-week training program in about 3 weeks. I have heard nothing but great things about the Flying Pig, and it sounds like a lot of fun. It is also much larger than the Akron Marathon, with well over 10,000 participants last year. I also plan to run a few warm-up races before this, including the Capitol City Half Marathon in Columbus on April 1st and the Hermes Cleveland 10 Miler on April 22nd. This will really help me get in marathon mode as running these organized events is quite a shift from running on one's own.

Does running a spring marathon mean that I'm going to take the summer and rest of the year off after that? Nope. If things go as planned, I will also be running a fall marathon. While I wouldn't mind running Akron again, I think it would be more fun to try something different. I am considering both the Twin Cities Marathon (a highly regarded race in Minneapolis) and the Chicago Marathon (one of the 5 biggest races in the country). But all of this is tentative. I could decide a few weeks from now that I am sick of running and take up some other crazy personal challenge. We'll see what happens. Next week I will probably start a new blog to serve as my personal training log for all of this (so as to not bore all of the readers of this blog with the details of my runs, which aren't even that interesting to me). It just helps to keep track of all of this stuff and get the occassional feedback from other people.

So while 2005 will most likely be remembered by myself as the year of the running, it looks like 2006 will easily steal away that title if things go as planned.

This entry was posted by Brad, on Tuesday, December 27, 2005. You can leave your response.