This week brings to an end the first half of my marathon training for this year. In 10 weeks I will I will be running through all five boroughs of New York City again and I can’t wait! The love I have for this city and marathon are strong.

There was a lot of uncertainty for me at the beginning of this training season, that have been well documented on this little blog. Even though I am training for my fourth marathon, this is really the first one with substantial goals attached to it.

So, with that said, let’s review those goals at the half way point!

1. I want to finish the marathon in XXXX – I never actually posted what my goal time was on the blog. I never do that. I don’t know why but I’m not going to change that now. Believe me you will always know if I reach my goal time or not. Just see all of the posts about me not hitting my goal time for all of my half marathons this past year. I have told only one other person and right now I can see myself telling one other person and that’s it. Any way, the goal is still very much in reach. Yay!

2. Train like the veteran marathoner you are and use the intermediate training plan instead of the novice one.  This plan has given me more panic attacks than I would like. Well no, that’s not true. I have brought on those panic attacks by looking weeks ahead instead of focusing on the current week.  I’m learning. I thought this plan would kill me with the weekend mileage that I have never run before but so far it has only challenged and forced me out of my comfort zone. It has bent me a bit but at this point, I think I can say with certainty that it will not break me. Yay!

3. Stick to a reasonable and healthy nutrition plan. Oh my fellow long distance runners, we all know what happens when we hit our high mileage week. We’re always hungry and want to eat every single carb within reach. My goal was to try and avoid that tendency and eat has healthy as possible and keep those portions in check. So far so good. Although I do miss those days when my long runs always seemed to end in front of a beer garden.

4. Find a personal trainer so I can actually do the strength training portion of my training plan. Yeah, that didn’t happen. I tried but just couldn’t find one who really understood runners. I was starting to get stressed about this and marathon training was about to start so I gave up looking for now. The first few weeks I did some strength training on my own and to date have done one cross training session. I will look for a personal trainer after the marathon and try to do better with what I can on my own.

Overall, I am very happy with were I am at this point in my training and that is such a huge confidence boost as I really start to add on the miles for the second half of my training.

I can also say that my non-running life has been holding pretty well during this training. This is always the hardest part of marathon training. True, it helps when the majority of your friends are also runners.

I have had a great summer filled with hugs, smiles, laughter, margaritas, wine, beer, more hugs, smiles, laughter, and more margaritas than I had planned. I am so grateful for all of these moments with some very special friends that it certainly has made up for the one crappy part.

I recently learned that a disgruntled/unhappy acquaintance decided to impersonate me on a couple of message boards a couple of months ago. One, in particular, has upset me the most because it calls into question my credibility and integrity two things I pride myself on. I was so upset that I almost gave up my social networking life and this blog. This person and their actions have cause me to lose more sleep the past few weeks than I have in a long time. The process of getting those posts removed has been a challenge but my desire to apologize and explain what happened to the person mentioned in these posts may be more of a challenge. That said, my running has helped me cope with this and stay sane.

I am definitely bent in more ways than one but it takes a lot to break me and I am very excited about these next 10 weeks!