e-mail: October 16

mollyjo.com

marathon home

October 16, 1999

I'm overwhelmed by all of your support, both financially and emotionally. I value your notes and encouragement. This has been an excellent experience to date although there are times when the size of what I'm undertaking sets in..as in " Good grief, what was I thinking!!!" There will probably be many more of those moments as time progresses.

As of this week, I will be at the 12 mile mark in my training. My schedule is to team train every Saturday morning (last week we did 10 miles) beginning at 5:00am. I promised that I'd get up early and sweat and that you didn't have to. How's it working so far? The other days of the week, I spend in the gym either on the treadmill or cross training. I'm allowed to have Friday off but usually, I throw in one more day too. I'm actually getting to enjoy this sweat thing and especially the endorphins that run rampant when you finish.

Training with a group has been fun. We have about 40-50 people who are part of our team, split between walkers and runners. I started in the very slowest group of walkers and have worked my way up to the middle group…..don't think I'll ever make it to the really fast group but that's OK. My pace is almost fast enough to finish at about 6.5 hours. (Disney requires that we finish within 7 hours…..no pressure there.)

We frequently have a clinic after the Saturday session. So far I've learned about shoes (mine are too small and I bought two pairs of them!!!), nutrition (carbohydrates and water are my friends), and preventing injuries (stretch, stretch, stretch). I know about lots of new muscles but haven't discovered chaffing as yet (but I know that I will.) I still haven't mastered drinking from those little paper cups while moving along quickly….I wear more than I ingest.

My fundraising has almost reached the half way point too. As of today, I'm just over $3000. You are all responsible for that. I can't tell you how uplifting it is to go to the mailbox and find that the checks continue to arrive. That will go such a long way to help further the cure for leukemia. Thank you all so much for supporting Mark, Justin and all of the others who suffer from leukemia or lymphoma.

There have been two things that I don't think about often ; the fact that it's such a long time (7 hours) and such a long distance (26.2 miles). All the rest is just details. As I said before, you're the best.