Gunther Marathon Training Part 4

Report:

In December Justus was hit while riding his bike. Luckily, he received no major injuries (due mostly to the fact he was wearing his helmet and two sister missionaries). However, he suffered some severely strained muscles, including those surrounding one of his ankles. He wore a brace for a while, but choose to take it off when he felt it was starting to "favor" his ankle too much. Now that we've started our training, his ankle is sore and not cooperating. Justus continues to ride his bike to school (26 miles every school day) and I am running (following the training program). He'll take it easy on the new ankle and is doing some ankle "strengthening" exercises.

One of the many lessons learned this week: Kate needs to run in the mornings. I find that if I don't run in the mornings, I let work or my other commitments drain me, leaving little motivation to run in the evenings. Like right now, I'd rather blog than do my 30 minutes of cross-training.

Also wanted to thank you all for the support you give us! Every little bit of motivation goes a long way!

Marathon Training Part 3

As I sat down to right this post I realized how many "parts" there will be to this marathon training adventure... over 40! So yes, I do realize that this has a high probability of becoming redundant and even boring. So...
Here's the quick wrap-up: Gunthers wavered a little this week. We're still moving forward, but seem to be losing that initial drive that we had. This is somewhat disconcerting considering we just finished Week 3; what will Week 20 be like? Hopefully confessing this to the blog world will make us kick ourselves in the behind and get running!

The Brick House

Our apartment is in an area that relatively recently used to be farm land. In fact, we still have a field next door to the complex. Most of the land is slowly being developed for commercial and residential purposes. On one of our usual walks you can see our favorite house. It's an older brick ranch style house and it lies in between an apartment complex and a townhouse development. For us, it was love at first sight and we soon started dreaming of owning and fixing it up. We've been curious as to why it seems abandoned and who owns the property. This little love affair has been going on a year, we even took a picture, but it didn't turn out well. If you are curious here's a link on google maps: link.

To end our story, we decided to act on our curiosity and went to our county recorders website. With most major counties you can look up information on a property online. Some are not free, however, and the counties are using the internet to raise revenue. We entered a close address and then used the parcel map to find out the parcel number for the house lot. To our sad surprise, we learned that the land is planned to become a town-house subdivision. Now instead of seeing myself buying and fixing up the house, I have dreams of being able to salvage the brick for a later project.

Gunther Marathon Training Part 2

Week Two of Marathon training has come and gone. We're please to say that we are still going strong. The mornings are slowly getting warmer and I am already dreading the thought of running in the summer. I just have to remember the story of the Little Engine That Could. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.



We learned another interesting detail about ourselves this week. I like to talk while running to make the time "go by" faster and Justus thinks talking makes the run seem longer. We'll have to see if we can reach a compromise, or else I'll just be the crazy lady who talks to herself.

Bloom

I love to read the blogs of my friends and family! I also love it when I find a great blog that focuses on great family, financial, and spiritual values. Bloom is one that I am currently following. It is headed up by two fabulous women who love their families. I found it while reading one of my friend's blog. I had some free time at lunch one day and decided to click on the "Bloom" button. I'm not sure if this is why they chose to call it Bloom, but I like the thought of how it applies to "bloom where you are planted." As Justus and I think more about our future, we have always talked about how important it is to "lift where you stand" (President Uchtdorf in his October 2008 General Conference Address click here for a link). They have posts about healthy snacks, living on a good budget, and helpful parenting articles (no that's not a hint that we're pregnant). For me, I enjoy the blog because it's always positive and insightful (plus they have giveaways like this one: http://placetobloom.blogspot.com/2010/04/le-creuset-anyone.html - who doesn't like free stuff?).

Gunther Marathon Training

The Gunther household is shifting into training mode. We've decided to train for and hopefully run a marathon. We're hoping to run one of the many that are available in AZ during the months of January and February. To help keep us motivated, I'll occasionally provide updates on our progress and maybe even include our statistics on charts and graphs. I know that you are all super excited to read all of this (hint of sarcasm), but we're wanting to keep this "exciting" for us. Maybe I'll even post a poll for which marathon we should run! It will be kind of like "Who's Line is it Anyways?", where the points (in this case votes) don't matter.

Justus got the inspiration from a PBS/Nova study where they took couch potatoes and trained them to run a full marathon in 10 months. The link for more information is: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/calendar.html

Week One Summary:
This week we started out pretty strong. We completed all of the required training! However, I learned that I am really out of shape and my endurance is slim to nothing. No injuries, just sore muscles. Justus and I are enjoying the extra time that we have together, especially when it's slow enough of a workout for good conversation.