Half Marathon Challenge

I am currently trying to train for a half marathon with some of my friends at the end of the year.  I appreciate my friends for joining me because it motivates me to train even though I don’t feel like it.

My wife received an email from a friend of ours, Beverly.  She sent the information for a local half marathon and 5K run on March 15th.  She suggested that I could run the half and Linda the 5K.  Well 10 weeks was not my plan for running a half marathon.  I believe that Linda could be ready for the 5K but me and the half?  So, I thought about it.  I laid in bed that night and thought, “could I actually do it?”

The next morning I checked out Runner’s World for a training plan for 10 weeks.  The first weeks long run is a scheduled 6 miler and 13 miles for the week.  I am only running 3-4 miles right now and 9-10 miles per week.  So, I figure that if I can follow the training plan for 4-5 weeks without injury then I would register for the half marathon on March 15th.  My first step would be to run 5 miles this weekend.  Suprisingly, I was able to run it without much problem.

One of my goals for 2008 is to run 2 half marathons.  If I can run this half then I’ll only have one more to reach that goal.  I may not be able to make this one so soon, because I may get injured trying to train too fast.  I’ll keep you posted.

 Thanks for the challenge Beverly.

New Year’s Eve

Las Vegas is one of those places many people come to for New Year’s Eve.  They estimated 303,000 visitors to our city for all the activities.  I would guess that with the locals added to that probably 500,000 people downtown on the strip.  Being in wall-to-wall people, where most of them have been drinking, is not anything I want to be part of.  So, we went to the store grabbed some snack food and a couple of James’ friends came over.  We hung out telling stories and related our life experiences to the Bible.  We had a great time.  The kids went home about 9:30pm and we watched TV.

At 10:00 they televised the events from downtown.  We watched from the warmth of our living room all the different activities going on.  As the clock struck Midnight there were fireworks that went off from the roofs of various casinos for 8 1/2 minutes.  As we were watching this fireworks show from our TV, I decided to see what it looked like from the upstairs.  It was so cool to go upstairs and watch the fireworks I was just watching on TV from out my window.

After it was all over we wrapped up the night watching a little more TV and fell asleep.