A call for money, creativity, and suggestions: Run me into the ground, please!

Six months have gone by since I moved to California, sobered up, and pulled my life together. I finally feel like the ground is solid under my feet again, but my head is swimming. Now that I'm here, what do I do now? I have set myself a few goals for the first half of 2011:

1. No big performance goals. I'm out of shape, and any performance goals are sure to end in frustration. I'm only allowed to do what looks like fun, and I'm not allowed to care about how I do in these events. I'm just here to collect stories, t-shirts, and fitness.
   
2. In direct contrast to goal number 1, I have some long-distance cycling goals to complete before July 1, 2011. I want to get the best female cumulative time in the California Triple Crown stage race -- three double centuries spread over spring and early summer. I also wanted to break the female course record at the Davis 12 hour Challenge, but as I wrote this I found out that it won't be held this year. Damn.
3. I will also be riding the AIDS LifeCycle again this year. This is my most ambitious goal, not because of the 545-mile week, but because I have set the goal of raising $7000 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. In 2008 it was all about the bike. In 2011, it's all about the cause. There are more than 44,000 people in the Bay Area alone living with HIV (based on 2007 statistics), many of whom use the SF AIDS Foundation's help to get the medication, counseling, and social services that they need to continue to live healthy lives.
   

While goals 2 and 3 may seem challenging, let's be honest. I can ride faster over longer distances than most if not all girls I've ever met at such events. (Not that there aren't faster girls out there, but they're not into ultracycling). Given a decent state of fitness (which I plan to achieve by "having fun" over the next few months) I will probably have enough fitness and cockiness to keep me in the running at the Triple Crown. And it isn't the 545 miles over 7 days of the AIDS LifeCycle that will be the challenge, it will be reaching my $7K fundraising goal.

I don't know about you, but I need more than that to keep me fired up. I need something to do every day that will peel me out of bed and keep me motivated to be consistent. With my eternally morphing goals, consistency is my downfall. Last week I wanted to be a triathlete, but the week before that I was a cyclist, and the week before that I was pretty sure that I wanted to be an ultrarunner. A month ago I was thinking about lofty road running goals. Or finally digging out that Tour de France ass and six pack and making a body like a fitness model. Or maybe it was finally time to get off my ass and try Crossfit...

You see what I mean.

Goal no. 1 is about not taking the joy out of training, but I do need some kind of goals to keep training. Otherwise I'll have another week like this past week where the only training I did was my Spinning classes, and I took comatose naps for 2-3 hours every morning because I couldn't think of a good reason to move a muscle.

I think a streaking goal would be fun, but it needs to involve more lunacy and creativity than a "no zeros" campaign on my training log. I'd also like to somehow tie it in to my fund raising for a good cause to get other people involved in the cause as well as my progress (à la Eddie Izzard's marathons around the UK). Ideally, it will tie into a glut of entertaining blogs again, as with the race-a-week year in 2008 and the chronicle of my crawl back to sobriety a few months ago. I would like to do something truly extraordinary, but with my work schedule, it will have to be the everyman kind of extraordinary.

Another thing that has been gnawing away at me is that the sparkling gay men with their perfect hair cuts and perfect bodies under their spotless and impeckable clothes are not the only group that benefits from the SFAF's assistance. As unpleasant as it is to see, smell, hear, interact with, think about, and be a victim of the junkies that troll the urban piss bogs of San Francisco, they remind me every day of where addiction can take you if you're not lucky. In the neighborhood where I work, I see them every day. Some of them are addicts, some have gone beyond addiction and have just fried their brains past the point of recognition, and many of them aren't even addicts but a drug tripped a switch they didn't even know they had. You do really, really stupid shit when you need your fix: selling your ass on the street, sharing needles, who knows what other unsavory activities. You don't give a shit, even if it means getting sick. Then, if one day you start to give a shit again, you could still be sick. For the people who are crawling back up from nothing, free health services could give you your life back. I was lucky that when I cleaned up, I still had my health. Somehow I stumbled on the mindframe and hobbies that allowed me to come out the better for my addiction, and with my body still intact. I feel like I owe it to the world to use my body to do something extra for the unlucky. Just one week of riding almost seems like a cop-out.

Here are some ideas for how I can roll my fund raising goals, my sanity, and my hankering to get back into the blogosphere into one. I want to do something inspiring, but right now my mind just isn't coming up with anything creative. I welcome ideas, suggestions, and heckling. I also welcome suggestions for how I can get more people involved in the challenge.

1. Since my goal is to raise $7000, then I could shoot to swim 70 miles, bike 7000 miles, and run 700 miles before the beginning of the ride on June 5 (that's an average of 6800 yd, 411 biking miles--yikes! that may have to be ammended--, and 41 running miles per week).
   
2. Or perhaps more realistically, complete the distance of 7 Ironmans over the next 17 weeks. Folks could pledge a small sum for every ironman I finish, or place bets on whether I finish at all. Or I could just accumulate an Ironman a week for the next 17 weeks...
   
3. A reader-submitted workout challenge where each week people have to submit their most greuling swim, bike, run, and weightlifting workouts and I blog about completing them. The submitter also suggests "value" of the workout, and people can vote on how great they think the workout is by pledging a certain sum for the completion of each. (Get creative here: treadmill marathons, Crossfit torture, the worst hill repeat workout you can think of...) This could also serve as a bank to spice up your own routines with other people's favorite workouts.
4. Run the distance of the AIDS Lifecycle (545 miles) before the event begins (32 miles/wk... on top of bike training). Ask for pledges for every marathon completed. Demand a good story from each one (if I get toward the end of a 26.2 mile stretch without any good stories, then I'll have to run around downtown SF in a giant penis hat... no, wait, that wouldn't get me much attention around here...)
   
5. Burn at least 545 calories every day by some means or another. Hey, it's not creative, it's not challenging, but at least it's consistent.
6. Swim the English Channel, bike across America, run the length of California.
7. Lift 1 million pounds per week. This one could be fun. It would get me into the weight room and doing some Olympic style lifting. I have no idea how the breakdown would go, but it would be a complete change of pace and I'm sure it would change my body composition and give my updates a whole new flavor. People could pledge for every million pounds lifted.
   
8. People could just pledge a certain amount of money per mile run, biked, or swum (think a penny per mile run, a penny per 10 miles biked, and a nickel per mile swum), and cap it off themselves at whatever they are willing to pay as a maximum pledge. Then I have to swim, bike, and run as far as I can in the next 5 months.

I don't know guys, help me out here. I want to make it fun for people to support the foundation, and I want to make sure that the event is enough of a challenge. HELP!