Look, I'm "Progressive"!

It's official, I'm signed up to run the "Progressive Marathon" event of The Wipro San Francisco Marathon on Sunday, July 29.

As defined by the SF Marathon folks, a "progressive marathon" means a 5K race where entrants have logged 23.1 mi prior to the event, for a total of 26.2 miles. Get it? To me, it means paying an extra $5 registration fee, logging the training runs I'd be doing anyway on dailymile.com, running the race, and receiving a medal in addition to the usual race shirt and sense of accomplishment. So, really, why not?

And it gets better: The pre-race logging officially started in March, and I joined the challenge at the end of April, and guess what? I've already finished!! Put that together with the fact that I've completed and paid the race registration and bought my plane tickets, and I'm ready to go! Now all I have to do is ... wait two months and nine days, and keep up the running in the meantime.

It's going to be a busy week, by the way. Not only will I check off California (#6) on July 29, but by Saturday, August 4, I'll also have completed a race in Oregon (#7). I have a choice of two: a trail race in a park in Salem on the evening of Thursday, August 2, which was my original plan, or my current preference of the Greater Portland Half-Marathon (5K event) on the morning of August 4. (It will depend partly on how much of an imposition the early start of the Saturday morning race is on the friend I'll be visiting in Portland.)

The Oregon race, whichever I choose, will also be the first race I'll complete on my first-ever visit to the state in question. Only a few races will have this distinction, because I've been fortunate enough to travel around the U.S. pretty extensively in my life. The other states I haven't visited, or at least driven through, are: AK, ID, IA, MT, NE, and WA. This is one of the two especially fun things about this project: getting to see places I haven't seen before. The other especially fun thing will be visiting the friends and family I have scattered about the country. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone!

Meanwhile, I'm working on improving my pace. I'd like to get to a 9:00 mi by the end of the summer, but I also want to keep enjoying running. I'm already starting to dread my runs a little because, well, running faster is harder, and I'm inherently kind of lazy. Trying to balance my preference for keeping this fun with the great sense of accomplishment I feel when I manage to run faster. One approach is to come up with other incentives to get myself to run, as mentioned in an earlier post. It would be really cool if I could convince myself to work hard just because working hard is a good thing to do. Hmm, and if I can do that in the context of running, perhaps I can even translate that to other areas of my life?

For now, I'm just going to plan on running again tomorrow morning.