Wow, what a week! Things on DailyMile are really heating up. The weekly challenges (created by RunTalkRadio’s Thomas N have been amazing so far – I look forward to them so much, and they’re always creative and fun. One of the best things about them is that they create quite the conversation in the DailyMile community!

(By the way, RunTalkRadio is amazing. What a fun, informative, and hilarious site!)

So imagine my surprise when this week the challenge had my name on it! My running friend Stephanie (who went from 0 miles to running her first 50k in less than a year ) was the challenge honoree last week, and being the sweetheart that she is she recommended that this week’s challenge be about me! Check out the awesome artwork for the challenge:

The challenge is called the Kate M Haiku Challenge, and participants are tasked with running 5.75 miles and then writing a Haiku poem about their run. If you’ve blocked out your high school poetry unit as I have, Haiku are poems that have a set number of syllables per line, specifically 5 – 7 – 5 (get it? That’s why you run 5.75 miles!)

I am so excited to be part of this week’s RunTalkRadio challenge – thanks Stephanie and RTR! It’s been so fun to read everyone’s poems coming in. Here are some samples!

Plus we have some DMers who went above and beyond:

Seven miles today.
After yesterday’s repeats?
I must be stupid.

Promise of sunshine
Was a cruel, cruel lie
F*** you, weatherman.

– Jay P.

Another 8 miles
The same shit different day
Hamster on a wheel

Warmer than I thought
Shoulda worn just a tee shirt
Cooked in my own juice

More rain on the way
But today I did beat it
Dry shoes tomorrow

Shin still seems better
And so does my attitude
Better days ahead

A haiku challenge
But run five point seven five?
I like integers

– Chaz H.

My non-runner (but possible convert? I’m working on it) friend is crazy good at haiku and wrote me this one:

don’t run too much
but kate makes awesome baked goods
so here’s a haiku

I can’t claim my poetic contribution is quite as awesome as everyone else’s, but:

There once was a challenge to do
That asked for a poem impromptu
I sat down to do it
But once I got through it
Realized it should be haiku
– Kate M

Whoops :P

Woohoo! I’m running again! One morning I woke up and the pain was … different. Not *totally* gone, but very slight and different. Hardly noticeable. So I have been doing short runs (1-2 miles) with lots of walking in between. So far things feel good – fingers crossed! Hopefully the healing will go well and I’ll be able to start doing some regular mileage again. Tomorrow I’m going to shoot for an easy 3 miler and see how that feels.

A huge thank you to everyone who has helped me stay motivated through my injury – it really helped!

Wow. What an honor! I can’t believe it – I’m part of team DailyMile.

For those of you who don’t know what DailyMile is, go to www.dailymile.com RIGHT NOW and sign up! Go on! I’ll wait!

Okay now that you’re back, DailyMile is a website for runners. Let me rephrase that. DailyMile is THE website for runners. It has such an amazing community – there are runners of all abilities, from all over the globe. The two things that all DMers have in common is a love of running and an upbeat, kind, humble, encouraging personality.

Team DailyMile is a group made up of the most enthusiastic DailyMilers. I am so excited to be part of this group. My teammates are some of the runners I admire most – not necessarily for their speed (though some of them are FAST!) – but for their dedication, willingness to help others, and love of the sport. I  can’t wait to start working with them to spread our love of running.

Thank you, DailyMile! I’m excited to be able to give back to a site that has been such a great part of my running life.

Leg’s still bugging me, but I’ve been keeping up with my 2010 Resolution to do strength training 3x a week for 20 minutes a day – and let me tell ya, it’s been working! I definitely feel stronger than I did in 2009, and I am starting to see the difference as well. T-Rex runner arms be-gone!

A big part of my strength program is the OneHundredPushups program, founded by my fellow Daily Miler Steve Speirs. Check it out at http://hundredpushups.com/ ! I’m on Week 4 of the program. I can’t believe I did 78 pushups the other day! Thanks Steve!

If you’re interested in the rest of my strength program, here it is:

Arms
100pushups

Abs

Plank
Forearms to Plank
Boat Pose
Pelvic Tilt (lie on your back, lifting your feet off the ground with bent knees. Use your abs to straighten your lower back so that it lies flush with the floor. Maintain this position as you lift one leg, then the other, tapping the floor with your feet as you lower them. Continue this for as long as you can, making sure to keep your lower back flush against the floor (abs engaged).

Glutes
Single-leg bridging

Stability Ball Bridging
Wall Sits – I usually do 4 or 5 minutes total, split into 1 minute sections. Sometimes I do my bicep curls at the same time. Multitasking!

Crunches
Medicine Ball (MB) toe-touches
MB Stability Ball Crunches
Bicycle Crunches
Bicep Curls – I use an 8lb weight because I’m a wimp. Also it’s the biggest weight I have.

Injured Groin Rehab
Hip Adductors
Stability Ball Squeezes
Clamshell

That’s it!

All right, I’m off to bed. I’ll need my rest for my swimming in the morning!

Hi everyone!
A while back I started a Comments4Cans drive, where for every 5 comments on my site I would donate a can to the Charlottesville Emergency Food Bank. And you guys came through and posted  34 comments! That’s 7 cans of food to feed the hungry in Albemarle County.

(Excuse my toes there at the bottom.)
I chose black beans because they’re full of protein and are easy to prepare. Also they are delicious.

Again, thanks everybody for your help!

My injury is doing better! The past few weeks I’ve been going to Physical Therapy, doing strengthening and stretching exercises, and… well… not running. :\ But the past few days things have been looking up, and I did 2 miles on the treadmill on Saturday and today I’ll head back to the gym to try to do more. I’m hoping that 2010 can start off right with a good recovery from my injury.

Due to the unexpected setback, I’ll have to revise my 2010 goals. After 3 weeks of no running, I’m in no shape to jump back into marathon training, especially since I’m not fully healed. It’s going to take a few weeks to build back up the mileage I was doing, and the last thing I want to do is re-injure myself. And so I’ve decided to not run the National Marathon in March – it kills me to have to postpone that dream, but I know its the right thing to do. I’m young and there will be plenty of other marathons to run.

Although I won’t be running the full marathon, I will run the half. With a little over 3 months to get back into the swing of things, I know I can do it.

I hope everyone had a great holiday!

Well, a trip to the ER landed me with crutches and instructions to lay off of running for a week (!!! A WEEK !!!) and to take massive amounts of ibuprofen. I’ve made considerable improvements since yesterday (I can put weight on it a bit and I can walk with one crutch instead of needing two) but we’re far from running. The injury is probably a muscle strain in the adductor region.

The second part of this post (beyond the update on the leg) is that my dad is AWESOME. Yesterday morning he drove here from Maryland (3 hour drive) to come take care of me – to take me to the hospital, get me food and settled in bed, get me groceries (since I can’t get them myself) and basically be amazing. I’m so lucky to have him to take care of me! He even spent the night on our dinky couch so that he could help me this morning.
Tonight I made my very first pot pie (chick-pea pot pie, using the recipe from the Vegetarian Times). It was delicious! :)

It’s that time of year again – finals. Classes start to wind down, there’s talk of some sort of test in the near future, finally you sit through that last lecture… and then there’s what my roommate and I have taken to calling the “Gilmore Girls” period, where it’s really too early to start studying but you don’t have any homework, so you bake cookies and watch an entire season of Gilmore Girls in a 3-day period.

And then your first final is a few days away, and you have to buckle down and hit the books. Or…. you could hit the pavement. It seems counter-intuitive but I definitely believe that taking 1-2 hours to do my run helps me to be more productive for the rest of my time spent awake :)

1. Running forces me to get up early. I don’t know why, but if I have a run scheduled I feel like I have to get up at a reasonable hour. With no classes during finals week, it would be tempting to sleep in.
2. Running wakes me up. It’s hard to be sleepy on a 8 mile tempo run.
3. Running gets me focused. When I come back from a run I feel like I can do anything, even convert a context-free language to Greibach Normal Form or whatever nonsense they’re teaching us at this learning institution. I am slightly weirded out by the fact that I once solved an algorithms homework problem on a run. That was just weird.
4. Running is a stress-buster. Last year at this time (that’s BR, Before Running) I was freaking out – I had finals! I had papers! I had notes to rewrite and problems to redo and hair to tear out. This year I’m a lot more chill. I can’t prove the cause and effect but there’s a definite correlation.

I’m extremely excited because I managed to get exempted from my hardest final – I worked hard in the class all semester and the professor decided to give people with solid A’s a break and let them skip the 4 day long take-home test. :D Wish me luck on the last few.

Also, thank you to EVERYONE who has been commenting – I am so excited about Comments4Cans. Please continue to comment! Remember, for every 5 comments I will donate 1 can to the hungry of Charlottesville! Every comment counts.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with a fellow runner who will be in town for the day – I’m taking her on a tour of my town! I’ll definitely take pictures of our excursion!