My HUGE Announcement

This is how I looked about a year ago:

And this is how I looked about 4 years ago:

And this is how I'll look in just a few short months:

Well, minus the child on my hip and the smile on my face but getting ready to cross a finish is what I'm going for here! Yes, I am wanting to run a race, a real race where I get a number and and there's a finish line and everything. Because 3 is my number, there's three reasons as why I decided to do this.

1. I want to be and feel healthy and fit. Reesey will be done breastfeeding in about 3 months. I know I am in trouble. Right now, I am below my pre-pregnancy weight and it's because of breastfeeding. I eat like Michael Phelps and I don't gain weight and don't really plan on stopping. I know last time I stopped pumping after 7 months, the pounds piled on quickly. I really don't want that to happen again.

2. I want to be able to say I ran a race. My 40th birthday is around the corner (well, in 2-1/2 years) and I'm not upset by this but it is a milestone it's just something I want to accomplish (Don't' worry there's more things I am contemplating too). I've been so inspired by Dara Torres, who is the 41 year old Olympic Swimmer who just won 3 more silver medals in Beijing making her tied for the all-time medal record holders for a female Olympian (she has 12 Olympic medals!). I don't actually watch the Olympics but I watched all the upcoming hype and have seen her interviewed many times. She has a 2 year old daughter. I am also inspired by Jen who has triplets plus one just like me and is training to run a triathlon. What I plan on doing is a drop in the bucket compared to these two Wonder Women.

3. I want to show the kids that you can do anything you set your mind to and that with practice anything is possible. Now I am not even remotely thinking I am going to win a race. I am just aiming for the finishing part.Now the kids will probably need tents to camp out by the finish line because I'm sure it will be a two day event for me and they'll need flashlights to see me finish since everybody else will be long gone and I'll be last but I'm still going to do it!

Now this is huge mainly because I am not a runner, I don't even like running the least bit. The
only running I've done in the last 10 years would be the sprinting I do down the sidewalk to catch Ethan. He's fast and my neighbor said the other day I need to get faster, I think I run better now than when I was 8 months pregnant . . . but Ethan will increase with age and I will only slow down without training. When I was in high school, we had to run a track mile every once in a while. I weighed 95 lbs in high school. But I was always dead last in the mile and I mean last . . . the fat kids (no offense to fat kids) beat me. I didn't walk most of it and I wasn't running and talking with my friends -- they were long done with their mile probably before I got in an entire lap. So needless to say a triathlon or a marathon is not in my near future. I decided I would go for a 5K race, that seems doable. Then the other day I realized I have no idea how far a 5K race is. I started thinking it was probably about 6 or 7 miles, well there's another one of my downfalls in high school -- I didn't learn my metrics conversions. Turns out 5K is equal to 3.1 miles which I can do even though I've never run further than a mile. I found some websites that tell you how to train for races of every length and for every skill level. Apparently most people decide to run a race then 8 weeks later -- Boom! they do it. I'm not aiming to do this in 2 months. I think next September I will run the 5K leg of the QC Marathon . So I am stretching the training to a year so I don't kill myself. A year also gives me time to procrastinate and slack off then panic and get back to business.

I discovered that our family can afford to join the YMCA. For a mere $40 a month, Aaron and I can work out and do all land and water classes and there's a babysitter there! We should have joined years ago! So there's part of my plan and I am also going to do some training at home.

I just want to finish the race and want the kids and Aaron there cheering me on. (Aaron already announced he wasn't running a race -- thank God, I'm sure he'd be complaining about how slow I am all the way).

I just have one question, does training for a 5K race mean you need to drink less Diet Mountain Dew and eat less donuts, hmmmm . . . . .