Marathon Madness

After my first brick workout of the bike trip and the frantic planning session that was SF, it’s time to tell about one of the exciting plans scheduled for this winter with Julie and my brother Jeff. As the title suggests, there will be marathoning, and lots of it.

We found out recently that my brother Jeff, who is currently working on his masters in Real Estate at University of Wisconsin, Madison, has about five weeks off this winter from 12/15 until 1/22. He told us he had no plans but wanted to be somewhere warm if at all possible for the winter. Seeing that Jeff is one of our favorite people, we decided to figure out a plan that incorporated Jeff and someplace warm, as that sounded good to us as well.

We also know Jeff has a thing for crazy running ideas. My brother currently boasts of a continuous days streak by running every day for a minimum of 27 minutes per day going all the way back to July 4^th, 2008. That’s right, over three years in a row without missing a day. And why 27 minutes? Because older brother Matt had a streak of over 200 days with a 25 minute minimum. Along with his crazy streak of consecutive days, he is also attempting to complete a marathon (26.2 miles) or more in all 50 states. He currently has somewhere around 20 states complete.

Idea: winter running bonanza in the South with the idea of knocking out all the southern states marathons during his winter break. He was all in for the idea and now Jeff, Julie, and I are signed up for* 5 marathons in less than a three week time period. Here is the list for anyone interested in joining in the madness, either for all of them or just one of them:

-1/7: Mississippi Blues Marathon; Jackson, MS

-1/8: First Light Marathon; Mobile, AL

-1/14: Warner Robins Museum Marathon; Warner Robins, GA

-1/15: Baton Rouge Marathon; Baton Rouge, LA

-1/22: Ocala Marathon; Ocala, FL

We’re still working on lodging and will hopefully be able to use a time share, condo rental type of thing my parents signed up for awhile ago. If anyone has any other ideas of good, affordable accommodations for anywhere around these marathons at these times, please let us know.

To top it off, Julie and I are looking to cross something off the life list during this time since we’ll be highly trained marathon machines by the end of this. So we signed up for some 100 miler redemption at the Rocky Raccoon 100 miler in Huntsville, TX on 2/4 and 2/5. After dropping Jeff off at the airport on 1/22 for him to go back to school, we’re heading to TX to get ready for our second attempt at the 100 mile distance (we both failed last year due to poor training and poor race-time decision making; Julie made it 60 miles and I made it 80).

So today after riding for 5.5 hours on the bikes, we got to our campsite, put on the running clothes and took off for a 30 minute run on the beach to start getting ready for marathon season (and to earn our third meal of the day; see “The Urbanski Feeding Schedule” for more details). By the way, the feeding schedule may need some tweaking because with all we ate in SF, it isn’t looking like 3 hours of walking per day is cutting it; I noticed today I have a bit more pudge around the middle. Anyhow, we’re currently in between Santa Cruz and Monterey and are pushing the pace to get to Oxnard by the end of the weekend to see some family. The weather is beautiful and it’s good to be back on the road again.