Reflecting on my final Miles update

Tonight, I completed the last of the 69 miles that were assigned to me by my friends and members of the LRC for my New Year's Challenge!!  It has been a great journey and a pleasure.  So glad to have great friends helping and encouraging me along the way, and a terrific group of supporters and running partners!!

FINAL MILES UPDATE:  The last two miles in the New Year's Challenge were for Amy Themer Tell and Christal Kneer!!  Strangely enough, my name never came up in the random-number generator that I set up!  I think it's fitting that the last mile is for me... as well as all the miles to come.

With this goal behind me and my jogging endurance back to where it should be, my next challenges are:

1. continued weight loss, specifically getting to the 20-pound mark which is only 6.2 pounds away.  It doesn't sound like much but realistically I'm at least a month from the finish line on that one.
2. improving my pace to a solid 5.2 mph average, especially over longer distances.  I'll have plenty of opportunity to work on this with three races in the next three weekends!  I'm running a 10k on April 28, my second one, and I'm hoping to shave several minutes off of last year's time.  The following week is a 4.37 mile competitive run, and the week after that, Race for the Cure in Peoria, 5k run with about 25,000 of my closest friends.  More on that on another day.

 I've decided to continue my weekly "pack run" with Coty and the Lake Run Club by doing the Thursday Night Accumulative Marathon (TNAM) again this year.  I had a toe injury last year and skipped it, but completed the program in the 2010 season and it was really great.  Basically, the program works like this:  The Lake Run Loop of 4.37 miles is an accurate 1/6 of a marathon.  In the eight weeks following the Lake Run race, you meet up with a group of TNAM runners each week and run it again.  After 6 times through the course, you've officially completed you first "marathon"!!  It was a lot of fun and a great way to keep up my endurance, and you get the beautiful landscape of Lake Bloomington to break up the monotony of the treadmill or the sidewalks around the neighborhood each week.  Plus, the dog LOVES it, so many wonderful smells and little holes to explore!

So that's it for today.  THANK YOU to everyone who has been following along with all those miles posts on Facebook, and all those who have sent messages of encouragement and motivators the past 3 months.  I appreciate you so much.