9 Miles and a Green Monster

This week at Saturday training, I did 9 miles in a little less than 1 hour 40 minutes. And, considering how hard 8 was last week (not to mention it was my first time running 9 miles), it felt good. Like, I-could-maybe-do-one-more-mile good. But that will have to wait, since next weekend we are scaling back to 6. Can't say I'm too disappointed to take a well-earned break, though.

The prospect of snow did not deter me from celebrating MLK Jr Day by being able to run in the daylight hours! Ok, so I whined when I woke up to a coating of white stuff. But I made it out there about 1pm and ran on Pre's Trail, where I encountered fearless ducks that I almost ran over, a flock (gaggle?) of geese, and a few other brave souls like me. To reward myself, I made a Green Monster.

It was slightly greener in real life.

It's a smoothie with milk and greek yogurt, frozen banana and blueberries, and spinach. Yum. Basically, I saw this great recipe for creamy avocado pasta on this vegan recipe website, so I started exploring and the website lady has all these different recipes for what she calls Green Monsters, which are smoothies with veggies. And come on, I obviously could not resist a drink that is healthy AND conjures up images of Wally. And, it was not too bad.

It's official: my half marathon debut is only two weeks away! Well, it will be official as soon as my time off request is approved (which it really better be since I'm registered for the race and bought my tickets to San Francisco. Keep your fingers crossed!). I was thinking about it this week and, while my eye is really on the marathon prize in April, I realized that after February 5th I can be one of those people with those 13.1 stickers on their car. Not that Bubba needs any kind of embellishment - maybe I'll find another place for that sticker where I can (maybe a little too) proudly display it. Maybe something like this...

In case you didn't catch it on Facebook - this is my medal for finishing first in my age group at the First Run 10k!

And finally, I'm still waiting on my thousandth dollar to be donated to LLS. If you haven't yet donated and need a really good reason, consider the following:

One great program that we have at LLS is our Co-Pay Assistance Program. The Co-Pay Assistance Program helps patients pay their insurance premiums and meet co-pay obligations. As you can tell, fundraising in our current economy is tough - now think about having to pay insurance premiums while going through treatment. The Co-Pay Assistance Program helps relieve that stress for our patients and their families. Last year the Co-Pay Assistance program gave out $100 million!

And, from our chapter alone (Oregon, SW Washington, Idaho, and Montana), we have given $80,900 in patient aide since July. That money goes to patients and their families to help them pay for medications, trips to the hospital, etc. Just in December we gave patient aid to 62 patients.

These factoids came from our TNT Eugene coordinator Charlene, who works hard to remind us, along with our Honored Teammate Katy Franklin, what we are raising money for. Katy and her mom, after getting help from LLS, now volunteer with LLS to be "on-call" to help other families deal with a diagnosis of blood cancer by listening and sharing their concerns.

So, if all this sounds like something you think is pretty cool and you'd like to donate, visit my personal fundraising page at: http://pages.teamintraining.org/oswim/eugene12/rvarner

Thanks!