I love running....when I'm done.

My friend Jessica and I are training for our second half marathon. For our first half back in April, we mistakenly planned to train during winter months, during what became one of the worst winters ever. Tons of snow and sub-zero temps led to a real lack of training, but we finished with our walk-jog strategy just under 3 hours. Not great, but we finished. Determined to do better the next time, and fired up after our first big race, we signed up for a second. The Chicago half in September.

With our first half, based on distance and finish time, we had about a 13:21 per mile pace. Turns out, the race we signed up for has a 13 min mile minimum.... which we didn't know till we paid the entry fee and booked a place in Chicago to stay.

We have to significantly beat our time from first race to avoid being picked up by the "support busses."

I now have a fancy Garmin running watch.  It is more accurate than iPhone apps and gives us lots of info about our pace and distance and even lets me check out fancy graphs and such after a run.

And so far, our pace SUCKS. We started training late, since apparently that's our thing, and over our last three runs (the only ones we've really done to train) we have averaged between a 15-16 min pace per mile.

If you are bad at math, that means we are 2-3 minutes per mile TOO SLOW. And we have to go 13 miles!

The prospect of paying all this money to stay in Chicago, enter this race, plus having loved ones watch us run, only to not finish and get picked up by a support bus is terrifying.

While we are running recently, we find ourselves saying, "I hate running." or "what were we thinking?"

But once we are done, we feel pretty good about the distance we covered.

We have a plan to work on speed.... but we only have 5 weeks! Our only goal- finish fast enough that we don't get picked up by the bus. And when we do, that victory will feel sooo sweet.

Wanna help? We need ideas for custom shirts we plan to have made to wear during our run. Help us think of ideas! The image above is a strong contender in my opinion. Comment with some good sayings for our race shirts!

Thanks in advance...