11/2/11 First Blog ever

I am hoping that my journey to my first marathon takes me somewhere I have never been. First some background info on me. First of all, I have never been a runner or enjoyed running. I have been an athlete of many sports my whole life. One of my passions is refereeing soccer. That gave me the opportunity to be around soccer still and not get injured from playing goalie. The more advanced of a referee I became, the more I had to run. I started to train on the treadmill and a little bit outside. Suddenly, I got this pain in the inside of my shins after a lot of running. Did not want to run again..until I found fleet feet on Monroe Ave and bought a pair of their insoles. Lifesaver. Running all of a sudden was pain free. To referee at the high levels, I needed to train and run a lot. Doing this made me start to push myself to run further and quicker than I have ever done before. And here starts my journey to becoming a "runner".
I set a goal last year to run a half-marathon in September of 2011 at the Rochester Marathon. I started training 6 months prior and felt like I was in good shape for the half. I was sadly mistaken. The furthest I ran before my first half-marathon was 9 miles..not a smart move. I thought to myself..whats 4 more miles? well it was hell after mile 10. I am being smarter now.
Since the half marathon, I have logged 89 miles in the month of October, a month after the half. I bought the book " Run less, run faster" from runners world and this has put a new perspective on my training. I went from trying to get a much running of the same speed to doing 3 days a week, one track day, one tempo day and one long run day. The other days I will put in some kind of cross training. I am going to be using this approach all winter, even though doing the long runs on the treadmill will be a pain in the a%$.
Today I will be doing a 3 mile warmup around RIT, and then doing some track workout. Most likely I will be doing 8 x 400 meter runs at sub 2 min lap with 30 second breaks between.