Christmas has come and gone. It’s amazing how fast the season goes by, isn’t it? It seems like Thanksgiving and tree lightings and the start of (generally accepted) 24/7 Christmas music were just yesterday.
I don’t know about you but Christmas was lovely. I started the day with a quick 2 mile run and then hunkered down on the couch with a mug of hot cocoa and watched Love Actually, The Holiday, and the Christmas episodes of Parks and Rec. Sometimes you just want a little Leslie Knope especially bedecked in Christmas spirit.
(Aaaand that’s me whenever something involves puppies. Or penguins.)
And actually I don’t think I watched A Christmas Story the whole way through once. I caught snippets here and there of course and I could probably replay the whole movie in head anyway, but I didn’t actually sit down to watch it. Of course I lived it so who needs to watch it. Well except for the snow and the BB gun and the C+. Okay it was just the Christmas feast of Chinese food but that’s close enough for me. And it was really, really good.
Anyway, with the holiday season safely behind us, my focus is turning to running. Training doesn’t officially start until January 10th so I am still preparing myself. Turns out it takes a long time to prepare.
I have been doing some leisurely runs a couple of times a week. (I mean I went for a run on Christmas morning when I could have just stayed in bed. That should count for something.)
I studied up on training plans. I have to do some improvising when it comes to scheduling my run days. The majority of plans out there stick to a schedule of running on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with a long run on Saturday. Well, that is just not going to work for me; Saturday is the only day that John and I have off together, so ain’t nobody got time for running that day. Normally I just throw on RunKeeper and mindlessly follow along, letting that keep me in line; however, that also follows a Monday Wednesday Friday Saturday schedule, so I am going old fashioned.
This is going to be my new best friend for the next four months. Okay, maybe not that exact one. I want to get a smaller weekly planner. And that planner’s primary purpose will be to keep me accountable. If it’s in the book, I have to run it. Apparently it comes with the added benefit of making you feel like a total rock star when it’s the day before the big day and you’re freaking out because you have to run 26.2 miles the next morning and you can’t imagine that you ever thought this was a good idea because how can you possibly run that far?!
But then you look back over your runner’s journal and see all of the miles that you have logged and you realize that you’ve got this.
At least that’s what the running the blogs say and I know this because I’ve become a runner nerd who wants to PR at her next marathon who, therefore, reads running blogs. But more on that later.
My final part of preparation comes as something of a surprise and that is getting acquainted with my other new best friend.
(I promise I won’t do this all the time. “This” being both taking pictures of my FitBit after a run and using the Christmas tree as a backdrop.)
I didn’t intend on buying a FitBit because I never thought I really needed one. I could track my steps on my phone. I could map my runs with RunKeeper.
But my new company gets really into the Christmas spirit and provided a list of goodies that we could pick from for an end of the year gift. Nothing else on the list really appealed to me so I opted for the FitBit…in plum!
So my Fitbit and I have been spending the last week or so getting acquainted and I am happy to welcome him to the training team.
During the training for my other two marathons, I just ran. I didn’t worry about speed or hill work outs or intervals. I was just focused on getting the mileage in. This time around I am hoping to push the speed a little bit, to purposely tackle hills (multiple times even!) so the heart monitor on this baby will come in handy.
But also, I can control my music on it. And that sure beats fishing the phone out of my bra pocket every time a song lets me down. People tend to look at me funny when I do that.
So here I am. A week out and I’m ready to go. But enough about me and on to the more important things.
Last week, I talked briefly about the pancreas. Today I am going to talk about what is pancreatic cancer. It seems like such an easy answer, right? A malignant neoplasm that arises in the pancreas. Okay, maybe not so easy. But in fact, it is not just the clinicalism? clinicality? clinical nature of the terms that makes it so hard to understand and to treat. In fact, as many as twenty different tumors have been lumped under the umbrella term of pancreatic cancer. It strikes 9 out of 100,000 people in the US every year (for a total of about 50,000 people in 2015) and about 80% of those patients will die within the year. Only 4% will make it to five years, giving it the lowest survival rate of all of the major cancers. It is the currently ranked as the 4th deadliest cancer with the expectation of climbing to the number 2 spot in the next 5-14 years. With figures like those, it’s not hard to see why.
As you know by now, I am running for Project Purple to raise awareness for pancreatic cancer and funds for Project Purple. So what do they do with those funds?
1.) They offer a Scholarship Program providing grants for children and grandchildren who have lost a loved one to pancreatic cancer in order to continue their education.
2.) They have a Patient Financial Aid Program that helps families pay the daily bills that have become otherwise difficult to pay as a result of the financial hardship that stems from treatment.
3.) Their largest program, Project Purple Research Program, provides funding to some of the best medical centers and hospitals in the field of pancreatic cancer research.
A.) In 2015, Project Purple provided a $250,000 grant to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and New York University School of Medicine to study immunosuppression in pancreatic cancer.
B.) In 2016, Project Purple provided a grant of $150,000 to Dr. Eugene J. Koay, MD, PhD at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to work toward better quantitative image analysis for early detection of pancreatic cancer.
To be a part of these great initiatives, you can make a donation to Project Purple by clicking here.
Training starts next week, so I will be back with my goal for the marathon! (As well as signs and symptoms for pancreatic cancer.)
You are amazing my friend!