This category includes posts related to general fitness and athletic topics including running and cycling. It may also have general health-related articles and commentary about sporting events or trends.
Yesterday was the 2009 Katie Ride for Life, a cycling event for novices to serious riders to participate and raise funds to increase awareness of the importance of organ and tissue donation and encourage Floridians to make a positive decision about donation. It offers several courses, ranging from 31-miles (50 kilometer) to 100 miles. I…
Jennifer and I ran the Gate River Run this year, for our third time. We had a great time, both running very good times and enjoying the post-race hours with friends. Jennifer set a new personal record this year of 1:53, whereas I ran about the same time as I did in 2008. There was…
The third and final stop of the Waldo Triathlon series was March 8 at 9:30AM. This was intended to be my second triathlon, having done the sprint distance in the second stop and now the Olympic (also called international or intermediate) distance for the third stop. Since I was forced to drop from the second…
So, today was my first triathlon. It was a sprint distance event (swim 750m, cycle 20km or 12.4 mi, and run 5k or 3.1 mi) and the idea was to make whatever novice mistakes I was going to make during this event. I’m doing an Olympic distance event (twice the distance of a sprint) next…
This was my second year running in this event though I did the half-marathon in 2007. In retrospect, I probably should have done the half-marathon in 2008 too. By the time I ran this event, I had completed a packed schedule of races and also just finished coaching for Team In Training, which brought the…
The 2008 Outback Distance Classic is a Thanksgiving tradition here in Jacksonville, Florida. It starts at 8:00AM every year on Thanksgiving Day and this year was the 25th running of the race. There is also a 6k race that starts at the same time. The course winds around the St Johns River and under a…
As a marathon coach for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training program, I took a group of 32 runners to San Francisco to participate in the 2008 Nike Women’s Marathon and Half-Marathon. The event is a massive annual gathering for Team In Training fundraising groups. There were groups from all over the United…
The Baltimore Running Festival includes several races: a marathon, half-marathon, team relay marathon, and a 5-kilometer (3.1 mile) race. Interestingly, all of these races are on the same course at the same time at some point in the event. Even more interestingly, the race directory pulls this off in a somewhat seamless fashion, allowing all…
I did not originally plan to run the Marine Corps Half-Marathon this year but ended up scheduling it as a training run for the marathon team I was coaching for Team In Training. Looking back at it, I’m glad I did, because it was a fantastic run through some of my favorite parts of Jacksonville.…
The 2008 Disney Marathon was my first marathon and by far my most memorable. The event is at Walt Disney World, so the location is fantastic and the weekend is totally enjoyable, even if only because there is so much to do around the property. The fact that it’s hosted on Disney property also leads…