Hi friends, welcome to our blog!

 

This first post will be dedicated to explaining the purpose of this blog, our journey to the Cleveland 10k. It all started when my beautiful girlfriend, Amy, and I decided we desparately needed to get away for a weekend. With the both of us working full time, going to school in the evenings, caring for Amy's awesome daughter Madilyn, and trying to find time for a social life, we barely have any "us" time at all! So we decided a weekend away from town was needed... and well deserved. We chose the weekend immediately after our final exams, May 16-18th.

Amy knew I had been itching to take a road trip, so she suggested we actually go on one. I happily agreed and picked (almost randomly) Cleveland, OH. Sure, its not the sexiest destination, but we wanted a good long drive, but not somewhere TOO far considering we were only going for a weekend. Cleveland is about 6 hours away, which seemed perfect, plus neither of us have been there in a long time (Amy has actually never been). Cleveland also has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I have always wanted to see, and I thought we could catch an Indians home game. By the end of the day we have a weekend that included the Hall of Fame, a baseball game, a nice dinner equipped with some delicious craft beers (of course), and even a stop in Pittsburgh on the way home. Sounds like a nice little weekend away with plenty to do, right? Not so fast!

As I started to browse around the net for things happening in Cleveland that weekend, I stumbled upon the Cleveland Marathon. A pretty cool event happening in the city the very weekend we'd be there! Now obviously we cannot run a marathon, heck, we just ran our first 5k together a month ago (actually it was Amy's 2nd). However, the event did have a half-marathon, 10k and a 5k as well. This was going to be our second 5k (or so we thought)! Running through the streets of Cleveland, what better way to see the town than to jog through the streets, we were stoked! We then realized we had a small problem. We learned the 5k doesn't even run through the streets of Cleveland, that the track is in some park west of town (Booooo). We wanted to run through downtown! No point in doing that, so let's just scrap that idea... or should we??

I began to think, wait a minute, if we want to run through Cleveland in the race, we'll just run the damn 10k! Sure, we couldn't even run the whole 5k last month, but what's the worst that can happen? The course time limit is 2.5 hours, and figured we could walk it that fast, so surely they won't have to throw us off the course! Amy loves a challenge as much as anyone, so the idea was born and the next day she had us registered for the Rite Aid Cleveland 10K! Crazy, I know. Now, not only are we registered for a 10k, but it's only 30 days away!

So, now that we're in this race, we might as well prepare at least a little bit, right? We began looking at 10k training schedules, tips for distance running, cross training excercises, anything we came acrossed to help us prepare. Most, or all, of the programs we found were 8 weeks long (or more) so we had to condense quite a bit. Needless to say, we will be busting our humps almost every single day for the next month in an attempt to prepare for the race.

This blog will serve as our journal to document our quest to essentially not die on Euclid Ave in Ohio. Every day (or almost) we will update here with our workouts, our successes and/or struggles, our runs, our times, and maybe even some pictures. With our busy schedule, Amy and I don't get a chance to exercise as often as we would like, we go to the gym a couple times a month and run on occasion. So this is a huge task, and we hope having a blog to keep people updated on our progress will in turn keep us motivated!

So feel free to check in, leave us some motivational love from time to time, or just see how we're doing. Maybe it will even motivate someone else out there to get off the couch, put in some effort, and see just exactly what you are capable of doing in just 30 days! Even with our crazy busy schedules of work, school and life in general, we're gonna run the hell out of those 6.2 miles!!!!!!

  
    With love,

 

   Amy & Jarrod