Oh Boy! Why?

Why couldn't I have been more driven to more domestic deeds? Say - something like - creating the nicest yard in the neighborhood? Or - how about - one heck of a good home handy man? Sigh.....

It's not to be. These things interest me not at all. Instead my drive has always been toward endeavors of a slightly more extreme nature requiring a certain amount of physical endurance. Evidence? Professional rodeo - bareback broncs, climbing - both big wall and technical alpine, sailing - as in the mast in the water at 3AM kind of sailing, motorcycles - really fast mortorcycles, and last but not least - endurance sports, such as cycling 200 miles in a day or running marathons. Which brings us to the point of this post.

In less than 5 days I will be lacing on the racing flats and dragging my ass to the start of my 3rd marathon in 12 months. Apparently I'm not the only idiot that's going to do this, I'll be accompanied by 5,500+ runners, all with the same idotic goal; To run 26.2 miles in as short a time as their only slightly prepared bodies will let them. In all fairness, I'll only be running with a small portion of these runners situated very solidly in the middle of the pack. There will be a couple thousand running ahead of me and a couple thousand running behind me that I'll never see except maybe at the start or finish areas. The finish area won't count because I really won't be seeing anything except indescript volunteers prodding me along the finish chutes as if I were livestock. Gotta make room for that other half of the runners that are going to finish behind me you know.

I'm really not feeling very prepared for this one. I've only run ~460 miles this year in preperation of this race. My shins have been bothering me a lot and the leg muscles just never seem to fully recover. I've also been fighting a nagging cough issue since the beginning of March. My last long run was a disaster. Of course, heat, humidity, hydration, and fuel played a large part in that disaster and will be easily avoided this weekend with a little focus. But, it was a crash none the less, and these kinds of things do a lot to destroy confidence.

I will finish though. It will be painful. But I do know that my training has pretty well prepared me for a solid mid-pack finish. So now all I need to do is focus on resting for the rest of this week, get my fueling plan for the race in place, and concentrate on the positive aspects of this idiotic endeavor.

And I'll be able to add another "finisher" medal to the other sport paraphenalia hanging on the wall.

One of those positive aspects will be the calorie burn. I'm thinking 25-30 good ales worth!

So, it won't be long before you see one last post concerning this particular marathon and it will include a run report. Oh, and just to show how stupid I really am..... I just signed up for the Portland Marathon in October. Maybe I'll run it barefoot!

A picture of an actual runner from the Seattle Marathon..... Damn!

Cheers!