Getting Started

This weekend was my own personal unofficial kick off of my Team in Training adventure.

Yesterday I participated in my very first group fundraising event.  Even though I am on the Flex team, which means I'm doing everything "virtually", I am still able to connect with our local TNT group to do fundraising and training.  Yesterday I joined them at a local outdoors store where we were "celebrity packers".  We worked at the cash tills, packing purchases, telling people about TNT and asking for donations.

I was there for about four hours and it was both inspiring and exhausting.  It was a great kickstart for my fundraising.  I talked to what felt like hundreds of people and most left at least a dollar or two in the box.  It was really amazing the difference between having just a donation box there and having someone at the cash to tell people what it was for.  I do not know yet how much we raised, and it will be divided amongst everyone who worked the fundraiser over the past few days, but I think we did well.  There was also a woman there who gave $5 while telling me that her daughter had had leukemia and was fine now, and how important research is.

Today I wrote my fundraising letter and sent it to my staff member to review.  Once I have a polished copy, I will be sending it out to everyone I can possibly think of.  I will likely share it here as well.

Lastly on the fundraising front, there is no official TNT widget for blogs so I made my own progress bar for the side (look over there on the left).  Now you can easily see how my fundraising is going and access my fundraising page.  I purchased a domain to use so I could share my fundraising page more easily - http://www.tinkintraining.com.  If you want info on purchasing a domain or setting up a progress bar for your fundraising, let me know!  I'd be happy to help.

Today I also officially started my training, although I changed it up a bit already because I have a 10k race coming up in a couple weeks that I want to be ready for.  I ran an 8k LSD today and really enjoyed the cooler weather.  I thought about TNT a lot, and every time I wanted to slow down I motivated myself by reminding myself what I am doing, who I am doing it for, and that blood cancer treatments are a lot harder than a little easy run.

I am feeling super motivated today, in terms of both fundraising and training.  I hope this feeling lasts through the next 19 weeks without fail!

If you'd like to sponsor me for Team in Training, I would really appreciate it!  You can visit my fundraising page by clicking here.  As said above, I am working on my fundraising letter now and plan to offer the opportunity to have a loved one's name on my race day outfit with a minimum donation.  I will share that amount once I have a final decision on the amount.