Fire and Ice

­Few things motivate my workouts more than kick-ass music. It seriously is the difference between an ok workout and an awesome one and I have been known to cut runs short if my music suddenly dies on me! So making playlists for my workouts has become something of a necessity – I even have a playlist just for races! My playlists are very, very long and sometimes I include tracks that don’t always work out as well as I thought they would so there is a lot of editing to do, to save me from having to find the NEXT button on my MP2 player. I am always trying out new things but I do have a bunch of tracks that are my reliable ones and any workout playlist will include all of these. So, in no particular order: My life would suck without you I have two versions of this song (Kelly’s and Glee) and they are both awesome, with a great beat that perfectly matches my comfortable running pace. Telephone I have a bunch of Lady Gaga’s songs in my workout playlists but this one is my fave...

The last time I did a Disney race , I took a disposable camera. This means I got a limited number of photos from race and while I love those photos, I always thought I should have carried my digital camera instead. For the Disneyland half marathon I learned from experience and took my digital camera, which means I have literall hundreds of photos from the races! It has been a real challenge to narrow them down to these, which tell the story of my race and are quite fun too. Hope you enjoy reliving the memories with me! The start was early and it was a foggy morning, which made for a lot of blurry photos. When we were eventually allowed to start, I took this photo of the start line and the palm trees in the fog. Pretty soon we were getting into California Adventure and these guys were there to welcome us: I just HAD to stop for the photo op with the kids from the High School Musical show! The money shot in any Disney race is a photo with the castle. This race was no exception and here...

I think that all the races I’ve done (so far) can safely be divided into two groups: Disney races and all the others. There is something so special, so magical, so fun about Disney races that they simply can’t be categorized with any other races – at least not the ones I’ve done, in my somewhat limited experience. Earlier this month I flew to LAX to take part in my second Disney race – this time a half marathon in Disneyland. I had been training somewhat hard and had definitely been looking forward to this race since I booked a place in January. I have also not been to Disneyland for at least 20 years AND I was going to meet my imaginary friends from ROTE so the whole experience promised to be unforgettable. This turned out to be exactly right. Seeing as I was already flying thousands of miles to be there for the half marathon, I decided to give a bit more money to Disney and also registered in the 5k that was the day prior to the big race. I thought this would not only be fun ...

With just over a month to go until the Disneyland 1/2 Marathon , my training is now becoming serious, with the distances covered becoming more and more ridiculous. This weekend's run was a 15k run, which took me two hours to complete. Because I'm out there for such a long time, I need to make sure that the routes are at least interesting - it's all part of the mind games I play in order to get through the boredom of long runs. As before , I took my camera to practice and also because I knew this was going to be a pretty run. So come with me on a virtual run! We start at Willen Lake - where a lot of my runs start, purely because that is very near my gym. It's nice around Willen Lake too, and I used to run loops of it until I got bored, but I always add at least a loop of it to my long runs (if I'm going in the right direction) because it's an easy way to add distance: Before long we get to the Medicine Wheel which is on the north part of Willen Lake. And...