OK, so it hasn’t quite been two years since my last post but damn, it has been a long time!

I think it is safe to assume that we all have been under some sort of stay at home order for the past couple of months and are adjusting to what our new normal may be like. For me, I have been telecommuting since March 11 and my sanity has been all over the place and my running mirrored that.

I knew I needed to be more consistent and make a dedicated time to go running no matter what. So I have turned myself back into an early morning runner. Granted, this will only work while I’m still telecommuting. But for now, I run early.

My happy place! (c) Stacey Cooper

Living near a beach has made this transition even easier as it gives me the chance to run 

towards one of my happy places and feel better as I start my workday.

To help get my butt back into gear I started by signing up for a few virtual 5k’s here and there. And like many of us those few turned into several, so yeah there was some motivation to keep on running and thankfully the virtual races had some really great charity groups attached to them.

Even with all of that I still felt as though I needed a bigger motivation to get back into consistently running and to get me out of the blahs. Leave it to this crazy running community of ours to come up with the perfect solution. The guys over at NYCRUNS came up with the Subway System Challenge. It’s pretty simple, the NYC subway system consists of 245 miles of track and NYCRUNS turned this into an awesome virtual challenge. All you need to do is complete the 245 miles between Memorial Day and the day before Labor Day. Even better, the registration fee goes to a great charitable foundation, The Robin Hood Relief Fund.

That’s 15 weeks of running averaging out to 16.33(ish) miles a week. Totally doable for me especially since my out and back run to the beach is exactly four miles! 

I started nice and early today and practically had the streets to myself this morning. No one was at the beach and I got to take a nice deep breath of salty air. It was the perfect way to start the day even though a chipmunk tried to trip me.

My goal is to run on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday and mix this in with bike rides and other cross training.

There is still time to sign up and I’ll keep you posted on my journey this summer!