Marine Corp Marathon weekend is hands down one of my favorite weekends to be in D.C. The energy surrounding the race is amazing and there's no place I'd rather be the last Sunday in October than cheering on friends.

Megan drove down to my house so we could hop on the metro bright and early to get to my all time favorite cheering spot.


After scoping out a lot of different cheering locations last year, I felt like a spectating pro this year and picked out a great spot where we could easily see our friends running and they could easily see us.

We set up camp early. When we got there a few wheel chair races were passing through and not long after them the lead male runners went flying by.





Slowly but surely the packs of runners passing us were getting bigger and bigger.



We were keeping our eyes peeled for lots of blog friends (we saw Heather, Leslie and Kandi) and I was on the look out for a ton of friends from high school, work and college.

Our sign made us extra easy to spot and it was a definite crowd pleaser.


Zach did all the hard work making this.

(For the non-D.C. folks, Metro is our public transportation system, and it is pretty terrible. It breaks a lot, there is constant maintenance that slows things down, and it's horribly expensive for the level of service you get. But it is a necessary evil if you want to get around the city. I'm grateful it exists so I don't have to drive, but I absolutely hate how unreliable it is.)

Tons of people (both spectators and runners) stopped us to ask if they could take a picture of us with the sign. Runners were cracking up and laughing to their friends and shouting to us that it was so true. I was really happy Megan and I were able to provide a bit of entertainment and comic relief in the middle of the marathon.



If it weren't for the sign, I wouldn't have spotted my friend Marisa, my high school teacher or my coworker.

After we saw Zach, his sister Jess and her fiance Ryan and my other friend Peter run past, Megan and I were ready to pack it in and head home. Megan had to run 22 miles, but as we were walking back to the Metro, I wanted to stop at mile 20 to wait for everyone to pass through again. Megan headed back home to knock out her run and I watched and cheered some more.

After Zach and Peter ran past again I told them I'd meet them at the finish, and I high-tailed it to the Metro to beat them there.

It is a long, long walk from the Metro to the finish line, but I scrambled through the crowds and made it into the grand stand with plenty of time to spare. I was scanning the runners looking for familiar faces and after not too long I saw Zach, Jess and Ryan heading up the hill. It was Jess and Ryan's first marathon and all three of them were smiling and looking awesome. The race finishes on an uphill (kind of cruel if you ask me), but they were moving at a good pace and looking great.


Me, Zach and the world's most popular race sign

I hung out for a while at the finish line looking for Peter. He hadn't been too far behind Zach's crew for most of the race, but after waiting for a while, I was afraid I'd missed him. I wandered back to the finish area, hoping I'd somehow magically be able to find everyone (this is a very poor plan), but luckily I spotted Zach's younger sister and the rest of his family and we headed over to baggage claim to meet up with all the runners.


Me and Peter after his very first marathon!

Huge congratulations to everyone who ran MCM yesterday! I hope you all had as much fun running as I did spectating.

(If you saw me on the course with my ridiculous sign, please leave a comment! So many people stopped and said hi or asked about the sign and I barely got three seconds to say hi as you were running by!)


*Lots of these pictures came from Megan's camera because it's nicer than mine!

One of the things my friends tease me most about are my savings "buckets." When I save for a goal, no matter how short or long term it is, I create a "bucket" for it.


A bucket is just a separate savings account that I put money into each month, so it earns interest and is earmarked specifically for that one purpose.

I have buckets for things like a new car, a down payment on a house and I think I might be adding one soon for a road bike. (Perhaps triathlons are in my future after all.)

Buckets are a really easy way to save toward a certain goal and they are actually extremely easy to set up and use.

How to Set Up Buckets:

The easiest way to set up buckets is to create separate savings accounts for each item you are saving for.

Some banks make this easier to do than others. I manage all my savings accounts through ING because they make it dead simple to start sub-accounts that you can nickname based on your goal. It takes about two minutes to set up a sub-account through their online banking platform.

Once you have your accounts set up, you need to figure out how you're going to put money into your buckets. You can:

• Send money directly from your paycheck
• Set up a direct transfer from a checking account
• Move the money manually

For me the easiest thing was to set up an automatic transfer through ING. Each month, I have the bank transfer a set amount from my checking account into each of my buckets. That way I can set it and forget it. Once my system is in place, the less I have to mess with it, the better.

Finally you need to decide how much you are going to put into each bucket.

How Much Should You Save?

Well that depends on what your goal is and how fast you want to get there.

I have a bucket for a house down payment, but I don't plan to buy a house any time soon, so I put a pathetically small amount of money into the bucket each month. But I know I will need a car within the next few years, so I contribute a larger sum to the car bucket.

One of the easiest ways to figure out how much you should save toward a goal is to play around with Mint's Goal tool. I'm a huge fan of this tool because it lets you plug in a goal amount and determine how long you want to be saving for the goal and calculates the amount of money you need to set aside each month.


You can experiment with different timelines and different amounts to find a number that is reasonable for you. That's how I figured out how much I should be saving each month for my future car.

Once you set up a goal in Mint, you can link it to the savings account for that specific bucket and Mint will track your savings progress over time. Because I am a huge nerd, I really love seeing my savings progress tracked on the little graph and it motivates me  to be more frugal so I can add a little extra to my buckets each month.


I've been using the buckets savings method for about two years now and it's made it a million times easier to save money when I have specific goals I'm working toward.

In the New Year I'll be re-evaluating my buckets and setting up some new ones for other expenses like vacations, a road bike and maybe some design work on the old blog.

What are you saving for right now? Anything fun and exciting?

We've officially reached that point in my training for the Philly half marathon where I am so ready for training to be over and the race to just be here.

The newness and excitement of training have long since worn off, and I'm easily distracted by new and more fun fitness challenges.

I'm already looking past race day to see what's next. I'm thinking about my fitness plans for the winter and spring and I'm trying to figure out what will keep my entertained on the fitness front.

I've kicked around the idea of picking up a gym membership so I can use a pool. I've toyed with the idea of focusing on strength training this winter and I've also decided that I want to focus my running on shorter distances again to work on speed.

I'm so eager to start all these new things that sometimes plain old, boring training doesn't hold my interest anymore. And that's making it harder for me to find the motivation to do my runs. My training has been going well. I've hit most of my key works and I'm just ready for the race to be here so I can stop "being in training."

Do you ever start to get bored with you training as the race gets closer? How do you push past the boredom and stay engaged with your training plan?