Who? What? Where? Why?

What is Eating an Elephant? It comes from the joke "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."  My elephant is to run a marathon.  26.2 miles.  When I first came up with the idea to write a blog about me dream it seemed like eating an elephant was just as impossible as I was only able to run for .2 miles without having to stop and catch my breath and walk for a little while.  I would have to be able to walk .2 run .2 for just over 65 times. That is crazy!!  It would take me about 6 hours to complete a marathon, that is without stopping to take a "nature break" or to grab fuel, or to run up a hills or anything that might slow my pace.

My goal is simple...  to run a marathon in Maui in January 2017. (Because if I'm going to run a marathon...why not do it in Hawaii.) I would like to run the marathon at a 9:30 pace and figuring in a few this and that's that would have me finishing the race in 4.5 hours.  Seems totally do able.

I have charted this whole idea out and on paper it looks totally doable.  It makes my think I can eat this elephant.  However, for those of you who don't know me let me introduce myself.  I am 46 years old.  I started running in September of 2014 with the Couch to 5 k program.  I was doing great and then I tore my Achilles Tendon in my left leg in October of 2014.  I started to run again on January 1st, 2015 and took it easy to start.  Unfortunately other factors were at play with my body and I struggled to run for just 30 secs at a time.  My frustration grew and grew as I struggled with my running, and also with a health issue I wasn't really handling well.  Finally in July I went to my doctor and let him know something was wrong because before I got hurt I was running really well and now I just didn't have the stamina to keep up the pace.  Turns out...I had developed Crohn's.  Yea, that was the condition I was ignoring.  Today I am on meds and while the Crohn's is under control my running is not coming back as fast as I want.  But today!  TODAY  I ran well. TODAY I hit a goal.  TODAY running a marathon seems like I can do this.  TODAY I know I am crazy.

Now as I said in my first paragraph when I came up with this idea that I could run a marathon I was only running for .2 miles at one stretch.  That was about 2 months ago.  Today, December 26th 2015 I ran .42 miles and .44 miles without stopping. One was at the start of my run and one was at the end.  I didn't get much more running in the rest of my time but I can live with that.

The whole point of this blog is to record the journey I am trying to accomplish.  To write down my goals and keep myself accountable to those goal. To be brutally honest with you the reader and with myself. I want to relish my accomplishments and acknowledge my struggles so that I can learn what I'm doing wrong and try to fix them. I plan to record my weight, pictures of myself, all the messy stuff on here so if you are not interested in reading about how I had to pee in the woods..again, this might not be the blog for you.

Tomorrow I will give you my stats as this entry is getting long winded. I hadn't intended to start this blog today but was going to wait until January 1st but since I had a major woo hoo moment I had to start this today.

Thank you for reading.  What's your ELEPHANT?

-Tammy