One Month Left!

In exactly one month I will have hopefully be sunbathing by my sister's pool in Miami and will have my first 1/2 marathon behind me! I am very excited that there is only a month left but it also means that I have to push myself harder this month to reach my goal for the race. Today I ran for 6 miles under 9 minutes a mile so I was very pleased, especially since Chris was not around to push me.

Todays run was perfect weather (64 degrees) as that is what the weather should be when we start the race at 6am in Miami in a month. Earlier I ran this week inside on treadmills and I realized that I really do hate treadmills. I wanted to run more inside to get used to warmer climates but I just can't seem to do it. I am hoping to at least push myself in the next few weeks to do one run inside per week but it will not be pretty. The inside runs really got me scared about the heat in Miami, but today running outside (granted it was cloudy) I did fine so I will hope for a cloudy morning the day of the race.

I slowed down some this week in terms of training due to the holidays but I will be able to bounce back in the weeks to come. I also got some new running shoes and a weeks worth of both warm and cold weather running stuff for Christmas! I am so excited since some of the stuff I have been wearing was 10 years old! Which on the up side I guess it is exciting that I could still fit in them! I hope everyone had a chance to spend some time with there families and that you all have a happy New Years!

Double Digits

I hit the double digits on our team run this weekend at Burke Lake, 10 miles! It is hard to believe that I have come this far, the runs certainly are not easy but I am pushing through them. It also helps when you have some great teammates like Lynn to keep you moving on those days when you are just not into it. This week will be a challenge getting in all of my runs and cardio in with the holidays....

Jingle All the Way 10K

This past weekend about half of our Team Challenge group met to run in the Jingle All the Way 10K. I was very excited as this was another opportunity to run a race with Chris as a lot of my training I have been doing without him. We were worried that we would not get a personal record as there were over 4,000 runners and it was very crowded at the beginning. The race was very entertaining as many people were dressed in Santa suits, etc and a majority of people had bells on their shoes.

We got off to a slow start and got to the half way point around 30 minutes. From there the crowds started to thin a little and we were able to pick up the pace. Chris estimates that we ran our last mile in about 7 minutes, which I think I rarely did when I was running three season of track in high school! We were both very tired at the end but pushed each other and finished with a new PR of 54:28 for the 6.3 miles, which is an 8:46 minute mile pace. I can not believe how far I have come from my 10Ks last year and am very optimistic about the half marathon. I was even able to go out and run 6 miles yesterday which I would have never seen myself doing the day after a race. I am hoping to just stay healthy so I can reach my 1/2 marathon goal of finishing the race under 2 hours and 10 minutes. I guess now that I have said my goal out loud I need to stick to it and keep working hard!

I also have some other news, I reached my $3,600 Fundraising goal last week! This has been such an amazing journey! I am so happy that I have had the opportunity to get so many friends and family involved with the foundation and I hope that you all have learned a little more about what I am going through. I in turn have learned so much from my fellow teammates that for once I don't feel cursed to have this disease.

Week 10

After having a rough time last week with my Crohn's Disease, I am on the road to recovery. I was able to run 4.5 miles yesterday and 8 miles tonight. I ran with Cindy and Chris tonight and I thought that Chris was going to kill me as I picked the hilliest route in all of Arlington. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

My injections went well on Friday, the injections burn like hell. I had been warned, but it was still not what I expected. I am hoping I get used to it as I have more injections. The nurse did the first two and I was suppose to do the last two. I messed up on my first try but was able to do all of my injections. I will be giving myself one every two weeks, so I will get lots of chance to practice. So far the medicine has been helping as I am having minimal pain and have gone off of my diet and am now back to eating carbs. I am hoping this medicine continues to help as I am less then 2 months away from the 1/2 marathon!

Happy Hour Fundraiser = Success!

I am running out of the door in a few minutes to go learn how to inject my new medicine into me and then heading to New Jersey for the weekend. I have had a really busy week. I went to the doctors on Wednesday and we decided I needed to go on Humira right away. Humira is a TNF blocker that should hopefully but me in remission. The only bad thing is I have to give myself the injections using a needle every two weeks. I will let you know when I return how things go.

More importantly I wanted to thank everyone quickly for coming out last night for the happy hour! It was a huge success, beyond what I even imagined. By the end of the night I raised $565 DOLLARS! This puts me at 98% for achieving my goal!

Again I can not thank you all enough for coming and bring your friends! I am sorry I did not get a chance to talk to everyone. We might have to do another happy hour to celebrate my 1/2 marathon once it is over! Then I can spend more time with everyone!

Recommitment Day

Today was recommitment day in which you pledge to move forward with Team Challenge in training for the 1/2 marathon and fund raising. I am happy to report that I am recommitting and am so excited to be part of the first Washington, D.C. Team Challenge program.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I had a busy but wonderful time seeing family, friends and football (VT football to be exact). I might have outdone myself a little bit this weekend as I went into a flare. Since going off the steroid, even my strict diet has not been able to keep me from flaring, which basically means getting sharp pains throughout the day in my side and belly region. It is hard to run during a flare so I have not run since Thanksgiving. I did however do really well and shaved off 11 minutes from my previous Thanksgiving 10K last year and 3 minutes off my best 10K time from the spring!

I am hoping this short break from running will not hurt me too much. I go to the doctor on Wednesday and will be starting a new medicine shortly so hopefully that will help.

Thanksgiving

As usual this Thanksgiving I have so much to be thankful for, in particular all of my friends and family. You all have been so generous and supportive that I can not even begin to thank you! I could have not reached the 75% bench mark to $3,600 without your help. I also am so lucky to have gotten such generosity from the community, that has blown me away by how caring the Arlington community is. I know that in the near future I will reach my goal and at that point we are going to have to have a huge celebration!

Until then, I am looking forward to my happy hour next Thursday, December 4th at Front Page in Ballston. We are going to have some great prizes that have been donated by some fabulous restaurants and my favorite nail salon. The prizes so far are as follows:

- $100 Gift Certificate to Sette Bello in Clarendon
- $75 Gift Certificate to Harry's Tap Room (two locations in Arlington)
- $50 Gift Card to Hard Time Cafe (locations throughout metro area)
- $35 Gift card to Crystal City Sports Pub
- Several Free Manicures to Mystique Nails in Falls Church

I will also have gift cards to AMC theaters that I am donating as well as a few more gift certificates. I again would like to thank these companies for helping me make my raffle happen! I hope to see everyone at my happy hour next week!

New Milestone

Tonight Chris, Cindy and I ran the furthest we have ever run, 8.5 miles! We managed to do it keep a pretty good pace and brave the darkness of the evening, even with my glass of wine at a gallery opening earlier that evening! Now after two hours from being back from the run, I think my body is in shock. Every part of my legs hurts! I can only imagine how the marathoners feel when I feel this sore after over eight miles. I am glad we ran tonight because it would have been pretty hard to go into work after running this far. Hopefully, I will not be so sore in the morning.

Going to Miami!

After running in the 30 degree weather tonight and not being able to feel my legs, I have booked my trip to Miami! I have extended my trip by one day to see my sister and to get more acclimated to the weather once I get down there. Now I just have to raise another $1,000 and I am ready to go!

I am having a harder time getting my runs in now that I am gone for the next few weekends. I managed to run over 7 miles on Friday in the ran to the Key Bridge from our house. This is the furthest I have ever run and I felt great!

Tomorrow is the last day on my steroid so I will keep you all posted on how my diet does on its own with just my maintenance drugs. I hope everyone is doing well and is looking forward to the happy hour fund raiser!

Feeling Great

Despite having a nasty head cold this week, I am feeling so great! It is almost as if I have forgotten I have Crohn's Disease...gasp! The new diet must be working and while it is not very easy to be on a grain-free, sugar-free and lactose-free diet, I am making it through and only miss the guilty foods a few times a day.

Today we had our weekly group run along the canal and met with a nutritionist afterward which was very helpful. I took it easy this past week but am hoping as my cold leaves I will be able to increase the mileage.

In fund raising news, I will be having a Happy Hour at Front Page on December 4th, I am still waiting on the drink specials but then I will send out an evite. I am happy to report, the bake sale ended up raising a total of $200 after a few more donations trickled in, which I am very happy about!

Election Bake Sale Results

While I did get off to a very rough start for the bake sale yesterday I did manage to pay back all my debts and walk away with a surplus of $110 dollars! I had been hoping to make more than that, but things just didn't go as planned. In the end, however, I got to meet so many wonderful people in my community that were interested in learning about Crohn's and Colitis or that knew someone who had it or had it themselves. I heard so many stories and got so much encouragement for my race and dealing with my disease, which is an experience that money can not buy.

I would like to thank my mom and Chris for all of the hours that they spent baking and wrapping baked goods. There is no way I could have done this without my parents and Chris. Also, I want to thank my boss for baking as well and my friend Jane for helping me set up my tent in the rain. I also wanted to thank all of the strangers that helped me through donations and those that helped me set up and take down my station. In particular the one kind stranger who seeing that the bake sale had not gone as planned gave me a huge donation, which without his donation I would have barely broken even! Yesterday truly made me believe that humanity does still exist in more ways than one. As for the 150+ baked goods I still had left over, they have been donated to Arlington homeless shelter so more people can enjoy all of the hard work that went into making the desserts.

Ramping up...

Today we met at the tidal basin to do our run along the mall and by the monuments. After getting a little lost I finally made it just in time to start our 65 minute run. We ran over 6 miles today and I felt pretty good considering the fact that I have a cold coming on. I was a little annoyed that in the 20 minutes I left my gloves and water unattended that someone stole them, but I am guessing that person needed my sweaty gloves more than me so that is okay. I won $25 today after our run to go towards my fundraiser, so that was exciting since I never win anything! I had been the one that kept reminding everyone we had to do the drawings so people were joking how I had rigged it.

In other news, I have my election bake sale fundraiser coming up on Tuesday and will be baking ALL WEEKEND in preparation for the big day. If you are going to be in the north Arlington area on election day, please stop by as I will be pretty lonely! I am going to be at Nottingham Elementary from 6am to 10am and then at Madison Community Center from 4:30pm to 7pm.

With my new diet I can not eat any of these lovely treats, so I need someone to take them off of my hands! I will have Starbucks in the morning and pastries and baked goods all day! Speaking of diet, I am pretty proud of myself as I have not really cheated at all on the diet yet and didn't have one single piece of candy for Halloween, that has to be a first in 25 years! I sometimes think about wanting a carb or something sweet but so far I am just taking the diet on day at a time and it seems to be working as I have actually felt "normal" these last few weeks.

Entering Week 4

Yesterday we had our training session at Burke Lake park, which brought back a lot of memories of growing up near Burke lake and running their in high school. Makes me start to feel pretty old, especially since I am really sore today after the run! I only ran 5 miles as my foot has been bothering me a little. Cindy (our dog) was with me and I also needed to cool her down before the end of practice as I think she could have done a few more laps around the lake!

In fund raising news, I am still moving forward with my election day bake sale and am still trying to get everything worked out for a Happy Hour Fundraiser in November in Arlington. Hopefully I will have news on that tomorrow!

Diets and Desserts

So I have officially maded it through the intro phase of my new diet I am trying that has worked for others with Crohn's disease and UC. This diet, the specific carbohydrate diet, is a strict grain-free, lactose-free and sucrose-free diet that adds up to a whole lot of no fun. I am actually not quite missing carbs yet and feel very empowered with my homemade yogurt and chicken soup I made this week, but I know it will get old. Slowly over the next few weeks I should be able to introduce vegetables and fruit back into my diet, which I have been missing for 2 years now. Nothing like going from one extreme to the other.

In other news, I am planning to do a bake sale fund raiser at an election site in Arlington on November 4th (6am-9am then again at 4:30pm till the goods run out). So if anyone is interested in stopping by or helping out, send me an e-mail!

Today's Training Session

I had another good training session today, despite the sudden change in temperature. We ran along the Custis trail from Ballston to the Key Bridge. I ran with three other girls and we did 6 miles and I was able to run the whole time, including the many hills. Even in my 10K races I have had to walk, so today was a big day to finish the whole run without stopping! I am sure though that my legs are going to feel the hills tomorrow though...

Great Fundraising News!!!

Yesterday I got a huge donation that came out of left field that I did not see coming at all. I am truly amazed at the generosity that has been shown to me and my cause. When I started out doing this I was so scared I would not even raise $1000 and at this point I have already raised $1130!

I can not believe I have so many friends that have stepped up to support me, and I do not mean just financially, as I have 75+ people that have joined my facebook group alone to show support for what I am doing. Having so much support has made it so much easier to come forward and tell my story. So thank you to everyone! Especially to Chris who came up with some great fundraisers this past weekend and really stepped up to help me accomplish my goal.

My First Training Session - October 11th

I went to my first training session on October 11th and had such a fantastic experience. I am so fortunate to find myself surrounded by such motivated people. I never wanted to join a support group because I was always affraid that their would be all of this negativity within the group. However, as I meet more and more people with UC or Crohn's the more I realize that maybe the support group would not be such a bad idea as we are all in this together. I am finally glad I am surrounding myself with others that can understand what I am going through which I think is an important step in moving forward.

We ran 4.5 miles in a hilly section of Arlington (I am being to think all of Arlington is hilly) and I was very happy as I ran the whole thing and was able to stay in about the middle of the pack. There are 65 of us training, so hopefully I will always be able to find a running partner. This weekend I ran with Mary and Renee....Mary has Crohn's as well and Renee had driven all the way up from Richmond to do the training sessions as a friend of her's recently passed away due to Crohn's complications in August at age 23. I can not say enough how friendly everyone I have met has been!

The rest of the weekend I looked into trying a new diet of no carbs or sugar, which might help with the stomach pain and I also worked on a plan to raise the money for CCFA. More info on both of these topics to come.....

Starting a blog....a little background...

Since starting this journey to run a ½ marathon in an effort to raise awareness and help find a cure for Crohn’s disease, I have kind of been on a journey of self discovery. I know it is really cliché, but I don’t know exactly how else to describe it. Until I announced to the world that I had Crohn’s disease and started connecting with others that have it or ulcerative colitis, I was still in denial. Chris and I had always speculated that even after 2.5 years of finally being diagnosed that I was still not coming to terms with the disease and instead was constantly trying to figure out how to get back to my life before Crohn’s. In the last month, I have been working hard to move past thinking about life before Crohn’s and focus on how to actually start dealing with my new norm. This has meant countless hours of reading blogs, talking on message boards, ordering books to try new diets and to help cope with being diagnosed with a chronic illness in my 20s. I have decided as part of my therapy to write a blog about coming to terms with the disease and training for the marathon. And lets face it, if I have any hope of doing this race, I need to have some accountability so I will be posting my training schedule on my blog each week for my coach to review.

I will typically just talk about the highs and lows of training, as well has how my overall health is going, but today I decided to start with a little background info for everyone who is not familiar with Crohn’s disease. I guess I will start with my general health, I have never been an incredibly healthy, in fact looking back at high school and college it now seems funny to think that getting the stomach flu half a dozen times a year seemed “normal” to me. It was not until my last year of college that I actually went to see a gastroenterologist and they basically told me that I was under a huge amount of stress (wedding, graduation, moving, new job) and that everything would work itself out. After all of the “stresses”, I did get better however in January of 2006 I started first getting the “stomach flu” every few weeks and then it turned to once a week. It took several months and countless tests, but thanks to Dr Burkey in Williamsburg I was finally able to get a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease in my ileum (where your small and large intestines meet) in the Spring of 2006.

It was bitter sweet being diagnosed because I was so used to a doctor saying, oh you have this, here take this medicine and you will be fine and with Crohn’s Disease they don’t have a clear answer on how to manage this incurable disease. One doctor might think you should do this….another thinks you should try this treatment. So far I have been under the care of three specialists and I am still more confused then ever, which is very hard for someone who always has to be in control of everything to deal with. And then when the medicine is actually helping, the controlling part of me still can’t deal with the thoughts of how long will the medicine last, what if I get sick again, what if I can’t walk the dog in the morning because I am in too much pain. These thoughts go through my head daily, which is enough to make anyone crazy. Luckily I have a fabulous husband, Chris, to keep me sane and a great network of friends and family.

So far I have been lucky, even though I still haven’t gone into full remission; I feel so much better on the medicine and only have blockages (really bad stomach flu in laymen’s terms) about twice a year. I also do not have many of the horrible symptoms that other’s suffering from the disease have, as I only really have to deal with waves of pain, nausea and bloating of my stomach which for the most part I have just learned to deal with as they come. A large part of dealing with Crohn’s disease is also diet as well, so I have learned how to avoid “trigger” foods that can cause my stomach to go into attack mode. For everyone that doesn’t know what Crohn’s Disease is, it is an auto-immune disease in which the body mistakes food, good bacteria and other materials for foreign and invading substances and launches an attack against them. I could go into greater detail, but I am going to do my best not to get into too much personal info. So that is basically my Crohn’s Disease in a nut shell or at least the condensed version. If anyone ever wants to know more details please feel free to contact me!