Hopefully you’ve been following my 1 More Mile for Sunshine challenge, because I’ve been so busy running that I kept forgetting to email you about this week’s contest.
I got a pair of Recovery Socks to test out a couple weeks back, and have been wearing them almost every night. They are probably one of the reasons that I feel so good even though I am now running more miles in a week than I ever have in my life (one more college statistic I’ve now broken!)
There’s one thing that I keep getting asked over and over again for the past 2 years:
“Do you offer private coaching?”
Until now, the answer has always been, “I will, but not at the moment.”
For those local to Southern Maine, I help out with the coaching at Maine Running Company for those that don’t mind being in a group, but other than a couple of close friends I haven’t offered private 1 on 1 attention up to this point.
Well, this week I’ve finally gotten the biggest hassle out of the way (insurance) and will be offering a program at the beginning of November.
Now, this opportunity is only going to be open to a small number of people. I’ll have some more details and a video available for you on Monday (November 2nd) that should answer any questions that you have.
If you are interested in private coaching, then enter your name and email address to sign up for the early bird notification list:
Once you click on the submit button above you’ll receive a confirmation email. Click the link in the confirmation email, and you will be notified first when the coaching program opens!
In the meantime, run safe and stay healthy!
Regards,
– Blaine
P.S. If you have any specific questions about what you’d want in a private coach, just leave a comment below and let me know and I’ll try to address your question on Monday.
My apologies to anybody that hasn’t been getting their Run to Win updates for the past month or so and then got bombarded with my last 10 updates yesterday.
The service that I use to publish my feed that you can subscribe to got bought a year or two ago and has had some internal changes that have been made and weren’t being clearly communicated to the users, so I didn’t make all of the updates I was supposed to.
It is fixed now, though, so you should receive your regular updates again. If you’d like to subscribe to the site, you can do so by clicking here or entering your email address below:
On another note, I will probably get an update on the site late today with how Mike Brooks did during his 10 day race and whether he was able to run the last 31 miles to reach his goal of 500 miles or not. His back was hurting him pretty bad the last I heard from him. I won’t be able to get the audio update onto the site until tomorrow evening, though.
Boston Marathon Weekend and Patriots’ Day. They seem like a good reason for a vacation day and to head south for an hour and a half for a few days, wouldn’t you say?
This weekend, I decided to celebrate the holiday with a couple of giveaways through my email newsletter. If you aren’t familiar with Patriot’s Day, it is a distinctly New England holiday, specifically for Maine and Massachusetts (which used to be the same state.) The holiday celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the Revolutionary War. Every year, the Boston Marathon is held on the 3rd Monday of April and almost everybody in the area gets the day off from work and school and comes out to watch the race.
Because it isn’t as important a holiday outside of New England, I decided to limit my giveaways to prizes that are only really relevant to folks that live in this area.
The first prize was for a gift certificate to Loco Running, a local shoe manufacturer based in Newmarket, New Hampshire. This gift certificate is good for 50% off any pair of shoes from them. They are good folk, and do a lot to support running in the area.
There were 16 total entrants in the contest for the gift certificate.
The second giveaway was for a subscription to New England Runner, which is probably my favorite magazine. Every time an issue arrives in my mailbox I immediately flip through the entire magazine looking for pictures of folks I know, and then read it cover to cover within the next few days.
They do a really good job covering all of the major events in the greater New England/New York area, and have some good tip-based and athlete profile articles mixed in with the race results. I always get excited when one of my teammates is featured or is an Athlete of the Month.
There were twice as many people interested in winning the subscription to New England Runner.
If you have a similar local magazine in your area, I recommend you check out an issue or two and see if it is a magazine you want to support.
I had a little trouble getting the screen capture program to work at first, so ignore the little flub at the start of this video:
So congratulations to our two winners!
If you’d like to participate in future giveaways or receive running tips and marathon advice, then please subscribe to my running tips newsletter (I’m still giving away my report on the 3 components of an effective workout if you subscribe today!) Just enter your name and email address here to sign up for the newsletter:
Don’t forget to sign up if you haven’t already for tomorrow night’s coaching session! We’ll be starting promptly at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
The phone call is absolutely free (your carrier may charge you but I won’t) and I’ll be grilling Mike on how he raises as much money as he does by running for charities. If you’ve ever run for others or considered doing so, you are going to want to be on this call.
I’ve finally finished putting together my new Coaching Session CD, which is compiling as I type this. About a month ago, I did an interview with Tom Ryan about how he has become so competitive as an older runner, regularly running faster than people half of his age. Tomorrow, I plan on releasing a few tracks so that people can sample what Tom has to say.
However, it is currently past midnight and I’m not much of one for all nighters, so rather than try to decide which tracks to release, I am going to give you all the entire track list of topics and let you decide which ones I should release! I will be putting them together on Friday afternoon or early evening, so they should be available shortly after dinner.
Screen Media Films is provided me with 5 copies of the DVD to give away, which I did throughout the course of the past week.
This last contest was a little more difficult to win than any of the previous contests, since it involved doing a little research to answer a pair of questions. First, you had to tell me who ran the first sub-4 minute mile in Maine, and then what shoe company Jeff Caron ran for in Boston.
This became a little more difficult, though, because I actually asked a different question than I meant to for question 1.
There’s one thing that I keep getting asked over and over again for the past 2 years:
