My Active Adventures

My last workout of 2015 Where do I even start with this one? I guess the best place to start is to say that I'm grateful for 2015. It was my worst year for fitness since I started in 2009, but I think it was exactly what I needed. I've known for several years that I need to change the way I god about my fitness and my health goals, but I just never could do it. 2015 proved to be the time that everything came to a head and as I leave this weird year for 2016, I am left with little choice but to make those changes finally. Sometimes you have to give up before you can start over. Running the Miss. Blues Marathon 1/10/15 Things started out quite well. I had completed the Pensacola Marathon in November of 2014 and was finishing up my training for my first back-2-back marathon weekend in January of this year. ( Race report here ) I felt great, I was running pretty strong, I was relatively confident. I was still pretty overweight, and still not strength training or cross-tra

My friend Adam of Hiking The Trail asked me to write a guest post recentlyand it was posted yesterday. I thought I would share it with you all. His site is a great resource for someone like me just getting started in this whole backpacking things, and he personally has been a big help. Even if you don't read my post, take a moment to check out the page and site, and give it a "Like" if you enjoy hiking and/or backpacking. Here is a link to my post: A marathon runner turned trail runner learns to slow down – Guest Post

How many times have I written a post on this blog about needing change or lacking motivation? I'm here in that place again. I'm back here wondering what to change to get back my love of running. Don't get me wrong; I still love running. But do I love training? I love races. I've gotten to the point that I'm not all that interested in the miles between races. I feel like I've been there and done that. I don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything anymore. A run is a run, and some miles are some miles. But what was the point? Let's say I get home on a Saturday morning/afternoon after a long, tough 20 miler. Great. I covered a lot of miles, which many people really can't do, but why did I do it? I keep setting new race goals and signing up for things, but is that really the point of all this? I put in hundreds of miles between races, and most of them by myself. Is the point just to get ready for the next race? I used to love training. Training

Over the last several years, I have completed many marathons and many ultras. I start this post with that statement so that I am not misunderstood. I am VERY proud of what I've accomplished. When I started working out and doing the Couch-2-5k plan in November of 2009, I never dreamed I could run a marathon, much less 11 official marathons, 7 official ultras, 2 unofficial marathons, and 3 unofficial ultras since my very first marathon in March of 2011. These are things I never dreamed I could do in just 4 years. All that said, I am not happy with where I am right now with my running, or my fitness in general. When I started, I did more strength training than running. That was the case up until I had a stress fracture in my foot shortly after my first marathon. I was not able to workout, much less run, for 8 weeks. I missed running more than anything. Ever since then, my focus has always been running. I still strength train, but usually not that hard and definitely not that often.

Kristy & me ready to head to Mississippi It was supposed to be my first 50 miler, but it definitely did not go my way from the start. Sometimes that's the way it goes. I normally try to not wait too long after a race to get my report done, but it just took this long to sort things out and think about how to put my thoughts into words. Although it didn't work out, it was a good event, an interesting journey, and a change to learn. I fully intend to take the lessons learned from this race and use them to continue moving forward, accomplish my first 50 miler, and beyond. This was the final piece of 8 months of consistent training, which is the first piece of the puzzle of where things went wrong for me. I started my training July 21, '14 when I started training for the Pensacola Marathon , then continued on from there to train for the Mississippi Blues/First Light Marathons double weekend . My original plan was to do the Blackwater 50k after that (which I did), th

Me & my friend Laurel, who worked the turn-around aid station It's been a couple weeks since the Blackwater Trail Challenge 50k, so I apologize for getting to this report a little later than I normally do. As usual, of course, this won't just be the story of the race itself, but of all the stuff leading immediately up to it. Let me start by saying that this particular 50k was less of a race for me and more of a long training run. I am currently training for my first 50 miler, which will take place 4 weeks to the day after the Blackwater 50k ( Spring Equinox 50 Mile ). I really have been training since 7/21, when I started training for the Pensacola Marathon in November, which flowed right into training for my first back-2-back marathons in January, which flowed right into training for the 50 mile. So I've done 3 marathons during that time and I wanted to do a 50k as well. So, that said, I wasn't planning to put a lot of focus on time during this race, just hav