three things thursday

reach the beach edition

1. even though im on the injured list, im still going along with my dirty little freaks (yeah, thats our team name. i know youre jealous) to reach the beach this weekend. im going to be the dd....or something like that. really, i am just going to be the super peppy annoying chick who has all kinds of energy cause she isn't running at all hours of the night on no sleep. all said and done, i think we have had 16 +/- different people on our team. we are now down to 10 1/2 runners for a 12 person relay. we lost 3 1/2 of the runners in the last 3 weeks (me included). awesome.

2. we might just have the best shirts ever.

3. our team captain danielle has been such a trooper. finding runners, designing shirts, ordering shirts, assigning legs, reassigning legs, turning a 12 person run into an 11 person run, to a 10 person run, to a 10 1/2 person run, organizing vans, food and tweet-ups! she rocks and i dont think she is ever going to be in charge of a relay team again! thanks d. xoxo.

follow us on twitter #dirtylittlefreaks
@gksarahj5
@rtdanielle09
@fiftyforbilly
@kissing_frogs
@swimrjul

dirty little freaks

today i got an email with my pineland 25k training schedule in it...ahhh yes, thank you jamie! this only means 1 thing. it's time to get serious about my running. i haven't been running as often as i would like (read: super slacker). i have a million and one excuses for that but if i want to enjoy my spring/summer races and not feel like death while running them, i need to kick it up a notch.

while i am super excited for pineland (my longest distance so far is a half) i am even more excited for reach the beach. it took a while, but we danielle was able to nail down a 12 person, all womens team for the 1st ever spring reach the beach! the group is made up of 12 women who run sometimes and always have a good time! after finally getting a team put together our next job was coming up with a name. on one of my many drives home from my parents house a few weeks ago i heard ke$ha's song, we r who we r and felt that the name "hot and dangerous" fit our team perfectly....until danielle came back with the name dirty little freaks from pink's raise your glass. Ahhhhh yes...even more perfect. so dirty little freaks it is! ashley says no other team name has fit her better:-).

danielle quickly came up with his design for our team shirts:

front

back

(you can now be jealous of us!). we have split our vans and our legs. i am going to be kicking off the race with leg #1. i had hoped to either start the race or finnish it so i'm pretty pumped.

im really not sure what to expect spending a full 24+ hours with 12 crazy and amazing women. i've heard the middle of the night tends to be more like a flashback to middle school sleepovers. elizabeth mentioned something about jello shots and there was rumor about some beer somewhere along the way. may 20th can't come fast enough!!

do you have any good relay stories??

hood to coast

last night danielle and i went to brunswick to watch the premier of hood to coast. im a relatively new runner and i live on the east coast so i hadn't heard about the hood to coast race until a few months ago when i read an article written by ryan hall about the races on his wish list. hood to coast was one of them. clearly i looked it up and loved what i saw.

for those of you living under a rock (like i had been), the hood to coast is a 197 mile relay from the top of mt. hood to the coast of seaside, oregon. a team consists of anywhere from 8-12 team members. but seriously, if you run with 8, you're crazy!! you run all day and all night until your team completes the 197 miles. you sleep in vans, schools, parking lots or not at all. annnnnd you pay lots of money for this experience. sounds fun, huh?  i had heard about these kinds of relays before. danielle has run the fall reach the beach relay the last two years and i am finally at a point where i can run it with her. this year reach the beach is adding a spring relay and danielle is the team captain for our all womens team. its sure to be a blast shit show. i. cant. wait!

ok back to the movie. it follows four completely different teams as they prepare and run the hood to coast. the dead jocks in a box, the heart ‘n’ soul, the thunder and laikaning and team r. bowe.

the dead jocks in a box are a group of older yet talented and experienced runners who usually finish in the top 6 of their age group. while they may be older, their maturity is about that of a 12 year olds. good fun.

the heart 'n' soul team highlights a 67 year old runner who has run 70 lifetime marathons. in the 2007 hood to coast she suffered a heart attack just as she was about to head out on to her 3rd leg of the race. in the movie she fights to keep her heart rate down so she can run her 3rd leg, the same one she collapsed on the year before.

thunder and laikaning might have been my favorite team. their training plan consisted of drinking as much beer as possible and not running. teammate rachel had no idea she was going to have to run past midnight and swore like a pirate through her legs. jason becomes my hero and eats a huge, greasy cheeseburger instead of oatmeal before his final leg... but fought all the way to the end.

team r. bowe was run in honor of ryan bowe who passed away at the age of 30 from a heart attack just one month before he was to run the 2007 hood to coast leaving behind his family and wife who was 9 months pregnant. his family and college buddies got together to run this relay in his honor.

it was such a great movie. it got me even more excited to run reach the beach in 4 months. will i have what it takes to run alone in the country at night? can i run without the comfort of my music (im seriously worried about this!), will i get lost? how many memories and new friends will i make along the trip??

did you see hood to coast?

a whole lot of nothing

yup... thats what my running has been this week...errrr the last two weeks....a whole lot of nothing. i had hopes of running a half marathon last weekend but after my run 2 weekends ago i just wasn't feeling it. i don't have any races scheduled and have a hard time motivating myself to run when i don't have anything to work towards. im also a wimp when it comes to running outside in the cold. i suppose that doesn't look good for my winter training.

im pretty excited about things i have coming up in the spring though. jamie, who i met through twitter suggested that i run the pineland races over memorial day weekend. ive never run trails before but what the hell...im always up for something new. at first i was just going to run the 10k on saturday but when i took a closer look at the swag you get for finishing i wasn't real pumped about the water bottle. however, if i ran the 25k on sunday i get a cowbell. come on, what runner doesn't love a cowbell. not to mention the free beer and bbq afterwards!! i haven't signed up for it yet but im looking forward to it. the weekend before pineland i am running my first relay. this is the reach the beach 200 mile relay in MA. my friend danielle has run the NH one twice and this spring will be the first rtb in MA. we are forming an all womens team but are still a few ladies short (we need 12). i was chatting with another twitter friend ashley last week and it didn't take long to convince her to join our team. p.s- she's in missouri and we are in maine. we've never met and she's agreed to spend 24 hours with me in a van. i hope she's cool! haha. and not only is she running rtb with us she is crashing with a friend in boston for the week and then joining jamie and i at pineland the following weekend. apparently she has a hard time saying no:-)

what's hard is finding time to work out. i know ive said this before but now that im a mom i can't just go to the gym whenever or go for a run whenever. i have to squeeze it in between work and picking him up from daycare. i don't like going for a run after dark alone so doing anything when i get home from work is out of the picture. im sure ill figure it all out soon....i hope. in the meantime, anyone want to whip together a 25k training program for me? im much better at running when i have a schedule to follow.

this weekend im off with my family to PA!!!! we are going to visit my aunt and uncle, they haven't tyler yet. they live about an hour outside philadelphia so we are also going to watch sam, elizabeth and my neighbor mark run the philly marathon. im excited to meet a bunch of twitter peeps at lunch on saturday too:-) and speaking of sam...what are you doing December 26,2010??

sam is closing in on his 61 marathon of the year to raise money and awareness for train 4 autism! while we can't all be crazy like him, we can help in his celebration! on december 26 sam is running the operation jack marathon #61 for him in southern california. several of us mainers have been following sam on his journey since we met him at the boston marathon in april. sam has so many people who "dig what he is doing" that live all over the US but can't make it to ca to run. he has created a satellite option where we can run 6.1 miles (a play off of 61 marathons) wherever we are in the US. for a suggested donation of 25.00 you can run the race, get a operation jack tshirt and finishers medal. you can also bypass the 25.00 donation if you create a fundraising page and raise 30.00 annnnnnd you still get the shirt and medal. all the details can be found right here. if you live in the portland me area and want to join us in the run just let me know!! im thinking we'll run the 6.1 miles in the portland area and then meet up for a post run lunch and celebrate sam's craziness!! this cause is near and dear to my heart so i hope you will think about running!

leaving you with a few pictures! i borrowed my neighbors jogging stroller a few weeks ago. i think i would have rather been bundled up then pushing it!

my mdi relay teammate and amazing friend kate ran the new york city marathon last weekend! she kicked ass and im so proud of her!!