Happy Wednesday everyone! This week’s Marathons+Moderation guest post comes from Amanda, one of my favorite runners.  Over the past two years, I’ve followed Amanda’s blog as she has battled through injuries, trained smarter, and grown through the process. She is one of the most honest bloggers that I know, often talking about the emotional and physical effects of training in a safe and open forum which also inspires readers to comment about their experiences.

Therefore, I was beyond excited when this busy lady offered to contribute to my marathons+moderation series. I hope you all head over to her blog to see what she’s all about and gain some inspiration!

BALANCE IN ALL THINGS
When the idea to write a guest post about how I find balance with marathon training appeared, I jumped up raising my hand and exclaimed ”OHHH I want to do it!”

A classic sign of the marathon overachiever, who tries to run more miles than the schedule calls for, while still fitting in every normal daily life activity. Then because of my it must be great attitude about all things didn’t have time to fully do it justice, so thanks to Ashley for patiently waiting.

UNDER CROSS TRAINING
I am going to focus on the area of balance that was severely out of whack for nearly 8 years…cross training.  As I fell in love with running, I wanted more…for 4 years I maintained a steady 50 mile per week average while rarely running a race. Then in year 5 I wasn’t getting faster, I was just enjoying the movement…then to no one’s surprise I was injured…a lot…badly..and annoyingly.

Even with these injuries I still didn’t see the benefit of cross training or the joy.  Luckily this year I made a commitment to myself to cross training full bore for three months. This was inspired by a number of things:
-Reading posts like Ashley’s about amazing new workouts she had tried
-Realizing I couldn’t lift things if I needed to
-Being completely exhausted if I tried to do any other kind of workout
-An amazing race season that had really wiped me out

OVER CROSS TRAINING
It was becoming pretty obvious that might lack of variety was impacting my overall health, which was going to hurt my running. With my commitment I began to try EVERYTHING that came my way from yoga, Core Fusion, Biking, Swimming, Weights, core work, ki-hara…and again balance was out the window.

I believe this is in some ways the trait of a runner. We simply go full boar until we can go no more, but I’m learning now that cross training can be fun, make me a better runner and create a new type of balance to my entire life.

BALANCE
Cross training like running needs to be fun and for me it needs to allow plenty of running time during marathon training.  To ensure that both marathon training and cross training could exist within the same week, required some planning…but less than you might imagine!

Monday and Wednesday I do 20-30 minutes of weights/squats/lunges and Tuesday/Thursday I do a killer 10-20 min core routine.  Neither of these require a great deal of time and therefore can even be done while I’m watching TV in the evening with David. I have also made a commitment to try a new workout monthly! It’s amazing what shaking things up can do to remind you of muscles you are neglecting and excite you to keep going with your cross training…it turns out 1 new thing a month, instead of 20 is much easier to do and enjoy.

I’ve also begun to have a weekly date with my hubby where we go bike riding. He loves it and it’s a great cross training workout for me, so it’s a win/win!  I love finding ways to workout with friends whether taking a walk to talk, biking or a running group these are the workouts that create amazing memories.

There you have it…RunToTheFinish is about my passion for running, but more importantly living a joyful life. Balance is a large part of living joyfully and probably a process that will be ongoing forever!