10/3/09-Introduction to me

Hello everyone...I'm Carra and this is my first blog on this site. I am 39 years old and live in Southeast Florida (extreme Western Broward county, right before you hit the Everglades). I've lived down here almost all my life (yup, that's right, a native Floridian!) except for 5 years while I was up in northwest mountains of North Carolina going to school---go Appalachian State! I want to use this blog to record my journey as I lose weight and become a runner who eventually completes a full marathon.

I actually started this journey back in September 2008 when I re-acquainted myself with the Sparkpeople.com website. It is an amazing FREE site that has nutrition and fitness trackers and offers teams tailored to all sorts of things-your age, geographic location, interests, etc-where you can connect with others in your same (or similar) situation to get and provide support. There are tons of articles on nutrition, fitness, motivation and more. I could spend hours on there every day just learning (and sometimes I do).

When I started, I weighed 252.2 pounds and really never bothered getting any form of exercise other than the stairs at work. I started walking almost every day...not far, maybe 1-2 miles at a time. By the start of this summer, I had lost 37.2 pounds (I'm currently at 215). Sometime in late December '08 I ran across an article on Sparkpeople that had a guide to prepare you to complete a 5K. I thought "hey, I could do that" and so I started browsing the internet for other information. I started following their plan and being running across other information and somehow I found information about Disney's Princess Half Marathon weekend. I saw they had a 5K that weekend too and thought that would be a great first 5K for me. And so I set out to prepare for it. It was not a timed race, just a "fun run" type thing. They did have a 15 minute/mile pace requirement so I was concentrating my effort on meeting that. I wound up finishing in 47:37 (timed on my heart rate monitor watch), a 15:21 minute/mile pace. I was 224 pounds at the time.

My 2nd 5K was 5/25/09 and I didn't really do any kind of preparation for it. This was a timed race and I finished in 47:58, a 15:35 minute/mile pace. A little slower than my first one (but I am not sure the time from my first one is correct since it is not "official") but I was still happy with it since I wasn't really prepared to "race" it. I was 215 pounds for this race.

I have another 5K Halloween morning. I am still at the 215 pound mark---this summer I wasn't really watching my nutrition and was erratic with my exercising. I have gotten back into the groove of things now as I am signed up for my first half marathon in January---at Disney of course! It is on January 9th (my godson's birthday---he and his parents will hopefully be joining me there) and I start my official training plan this Monday, 10/5/09. I plan on walk/running it as I will not be at the point where I can run the whole thing by then. I will be blogging about my journey to my first half marathon and my continuing weight loss journey here.

Hope I don't bore anyone...but this is mostly meant as an outlet for me so I have a log of my journey. You are welcome to come along with me and offer any insight you may have...anything to make this more fun and fruitful is appreciated!

Carra