Three Weeks to Go! Home Run 10K. Ready for Christmas? $1.20 to go.

I copied this entry from the one I put on My Team Elisabeth page. last night.

My HOME RUN 10K results

Saturday, November 19. Skies clear. 24 degrees cold in Winston-Salem at 6:00 a.m. By 9:00 a.m. race time, the mercury had nosed above freezing at the Home Run 10K at BB&T Ballpark. It was perfect running weather for me, just 3 weeks before the start of the Kiawah Marathon. Sixty minutes and a few seconds later, I crossed the finish line after the 6.2 mile event about 2/3 of the way back in the pack.

BUT, my run was fast enough to earn me second place in the males 62 to 98 years old age group.

Next Stop: Kiawah

My next event will be Saturday, December 10th on for the 26.2 mile Kiawah Island Marathon in South Carolina. Thanks to all my supporters whose lifesaving donations to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society have made my participation possible and are helping LLS provide services to patients with leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma and other blood cancers and to their families!

Your donation comes back home

While your donation may go initially to an upstate New York based organization, your donation also comes back home. It came home for my wife, Elisabeth Motsinger, in the form of Gleevec, the drug developed with funding by LLS that saved her life and those of 85% of the chronic myelogenous leukemia patients who can now survive by taking a daily dose.

Last week, members of the Triad Team In Training met with dietitian Julie Lanford for a nutrition clinic. Julie works cancer patients through Cancer Services in Winston-Salem. LLS helps fund Julie’s work as a cancer dietitian with patients who have leukemia and other blood cancers, as well as other cancer patients. She teaches people how to use diet and nutrition savvy to prevent cancers, to fight cancers as an adjunct to other therapies, and to help deal with side effects of chemotherapy and other treatments.

And, she has wonderful recipes we all can enjoy. Check out Julie’s web site - CancerDietitian.com - for tasty, healthy recipes and menus and a lot more information about nutrition and your health. Like how to avoid gaining weight over the holidays in her November 17 entry. Julie points out that “NOT GAINING is like losing it in the first 3 months of 2012.... only easier!” and decries that Congress last week declared pizza a vegetable for school lunches!

No more free drafting of documents

Thanks to those who took me up on the offer to draft legal documents for you in exchange for a donation to LLS. You helped boost the fundraising to over 99% of its goal. Alas, the offer expired on Friday, November 8. Thanks to all whose generosity has helped raise $3248.80 (including checks in transit to LLS) out of the $3250 goal. Just $1.20 to go! If you're in for $1.20 to help save lives from blood cancer, click here.

The fundraising account will close on November 28, so those of you who are still planning to make a year-end tax deductible contribution may do so. In any event, 98% is a great showing and more than enough to allow me to run as a North Carolina Team In Training member.

I plan to make my next (and last) post about Team In Training after the race.

But, I plan to share with you important and exciting news of a much different kind sometime shortly after Thanksgiving weekend. Check back in here, or on my blog entitled Going the Distance, or on my Facebook page sometime Tuesday, November 29 or shortly thereafter and be the first in your crowd to know the news.

Until then, have a great delicious, nutrition, and auspicious Thanksgiving.

John

PS - Don’t forget to visit my brother Alfred’s Christmas Tree Farm in Roaring Gap to choose your own tree in the fields where I grew up. Enjoy a walk in the mountains, hot cider, and a chance to get Christmas present made by local artists, while you choose your special tree! Click here to see more.

Long time no post

Sometimes it feels as though I am sprinting an ultra-marathon distance (that's anything MORE than 26.2 miles). As my law and mediation practice gets busier and I approach the 25 miles run mark in my training for the Kiawah Marathon, politics is heating up here in  Forsyth County and in the 5th District of North Carolina. I'm in the middle, yet on the periphery.

Sprinting is not my forte. Never has been. In high school, I ran anything from 440s to 2 mile races on the track team. Went off to college and discovered legal addicting drugs (coffee, alcohol, food, tobacco) and gave up the high school lifestyle for more sedentary pleasures. After a couple of decades, I aged out of tobacco and spirits, took up some short distance running of five to 10 kilometers for several years. Got married into a household with two kids. (Talk about learning how naive I was; I thought I knew about parenting.) A little over a year later, John Jr. joined the family, I went into private practice and gave up exercising.

Almost two decades later, with the 2008 economic crisis heating up, I went back to the gym and again took up running.  My wife, Elisabeth, talked me into marathon training to raise money to defeat leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. (I hope you can help. I have reached 93% of my personal fundraising goal. Click here to read about it. If you're from North Carolina, there's even a chance to get me to prepare legal documents for you as a gift for donating to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.)

No, sprinting is still not my forte. I just run a few minutes, walk a minute, and run some more, and walk, etc. There's no way to get lost. I simply follow the 60 to 70 percent of the crowd ahead for more hours than I like to admit. Till the end.

So now, I'm still going the distance and in doing so have met some really interesting folks. For instance, Chad Nance who writes for the blog Weird Load Nation. Read his take on the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, for example. As for Occupiers, I certainly understand some of their concerns. A dysfunctional financial system, too much money buying politicians' votes in Congress and the White House. Attorneys like me have an obligation to give back to the community by doing some legal work free. So I have counseled with members of the local Occupy group on how to keep their movement within the bounds of the law while still being able to get their voices heard. So far, the local group has done it right, even working with the municipality to assure safety and legality. (My big fear is that some outsiders may try to cause trouble that gets blamed on the Occupiers.)

Anyway, keep me on your radar over the next few weeks. There may be some interesting developments. I expect you'll learn more about Chad, John, Jr. and others in this space. Until next time, Blessings,

John

Update on Kiawah Marathon Training

My "Team Elisabeth" Fundraising Page