Steph's Blog

Last week I decided to freeze my gym membership because I wasn’t going more than a couple of times a month. At the first of every month, the $75 dues would show up on my credit card and I’d try to avoid thinking that I spent over $35 for a single gym session. What I discovered was that now that I don’t have that gym membership, I feel more proactive about staying in shape because I can’t just say “I’ll just go to the gym later or tomorrow.” I signed up for a bootcamp class through LivingSocial that’s a lot cheaper than $75 a month and comes with a free resistance band. I’m running more and will be doing a few races in the next few months. Also, there’s free core yoga at work; doing that is a no-brainer. Knowing that I don’t have a gym to fall back on, is actually making me exercise more.

As a member of the New York Road Runners (NYRR), if I run nine races this year and volunteer at one race (organized by the NYRR), I’m guaranteed entry to the New York Marathon for Fall of 2012. I decided to go for it and recently signed up for a few races in the summer already, and one in the Fall. I’ve got a lot of running to do – at least one race a month until the end of December. Luckily, I live just a few blocks away from Central Park, and can easily drag my butt out of bed early on a Saturday or Sunday morning to get to the majority of these races. The only one that I’ll have to travel to is the Staten Island Half Marathon in October.

The first race is in a few weeks. It’s the Celebrate Israel 4-Mile race in Central Park. It’s my first race of the season and will also be a good training race for the NYRR Modern Mini 10K. I did this one last year and had a lot of fun. There was so much excitement in the air with all the elite runners at the start of the race. I even got to high-five U.S. Olympic runner Kara Goucher at the start!

Off to the races, nine of them. Check back here to read my posts as I check off each and every one of them!

I spotted someone wearing Vibram Five Fingers running shoes at the New York Marathon. These are the closest things to running barefoot without actually exposing your feet to the dirty and sometimes hazardous pavement of the city streets. Congrats to all the runners, barefooted or not, who ran the marathon today. Amazing accomplishment!

So I’ve started doing speedwork with the NY Flyers running group. It’s intense. Speedwork is basically a way to get faster by doing running exercises that push yourself harder than you normally do on regular runs. Like yesterday, I was told by my coach to run a slight uphill fast for two minutes. and then turnaround and jog slowly back. Then go out fast for one minute and then jog slowly back. I was to do this for 46 minutes. It seemed easy enough at first, but after, oh say 5 minutes, I was dying. And after about 30 minutes, I had to go pee really bad, cutting my speedwork short (oh damn!). Right now, I do about a 10-minute mile, trying to cut it down to 9. I’m giving myself a couple of months of this torture to see if I do get faster. I’m planning my next race for the Fall, so we’ll see if this works.