Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

First, I want to apologize for not getting out any Christmas cards this year - think of this entry as my Christmas card! :)

I hope you all are having a great week, and have a great holiday season! It sure looks like Christmas out there (in Wisconsin) - because there is a TON of snow!! Now if we could just lose the bitter cold and keep the temperature in the positive digits, that'd be great!

Well, I luckily got in my 20.5 mile run with the TNT group on Saturday morning before it turned this bitter cold! It was still about 25 degrees out, but it actually wasn't bad at all. Madison had nicely cleared the bike paths and streets that we were running, so it really was a great day! I'm trying to convince myself that an extra 6 miles after that 20.5 wouldn't be tooooo bad!! (I'm not very convinced at the moment! haha). The run was good, but man oh man is 26.2 miles a long way! I'm excited to have reached the "peak" of the training schedule, and now we will start the taper down to rest up before the big day! Yippee!!

On a different note, I wanted to share a quick story about a boy that my mom knows through work. This boy is only 5 years old and is currently battling Leukemia. He recently had a bone marrow transplant (his sister was the donor, and she is doing good), and is dealing with really painful mouth sores at the moment, and is on a morphine drip. His blood counts haven't yet come up (during the transplant, virtually all of the patient's stem cells are killed off to provide room for the donor's new stem cells and create more healthly stem cells). Sure is a scary time for everyone, and it's unthinkable that a young boy of 5 years is going through this.

Just another great example of why I'm doing what I'm doing - thanks to your generous donations, we are helping to fund research, education, and patient services for blood cancer patients and families.

I know I sound like a broken record, but thank you all again for all of your support! Merry Christmas, and thank you all!

Katie