The Ultimate Test

It has been a lont time since I have last updated the blog. I have been busy, though I am having difficulties explaining exactly what I have been so busy with. It seems like I spend all of my time doing exactly 5 things:

1. Working out, be it strength training, running, in and out of physical therapy, etc.
2. Eating—muscles need fuel
3. Grocery shopping and cooking (in order to satisfy activity #2)
4. Working—apparently food costs money; so does physical therapy and going to the pool
5. Sleeping—wish I could skip this one but have not yet been able to figure out how

Food is definitely the focus here. It is not just about breakfast, lunch and dinner. Eating for me has been continuous. My desk at work is overflowing with nuts, dried fruit, and chocolate. Occasional family events tend to revolve around a meal. TV watching is almost always combined with eating. Even long workouts imply carefully planned consumption of special “GU” to keep me going. And during those rare moments when I am not eating, I am ultimately planning the next meal.

Of course I run to eat, and I eat to run.

The ultimate test for all of this training is not the marathon itself. The race is more of a celebration after the craziness that the training season brings into runners’ lives. The test for me is coming up tomorrow morning. With three weeks left before the marathon, I plan to do a 20 mile training run.

I am excited and nervous. I am acting on the assumption that my ankle will hold me up. A lot of runners will be doing their last big long run this weekend, and I expect the marathon course will be quite crowded. I heard that some out of town runners come out to Boston to do this run on the marathon course, and that locals come out to cheers the runners on. When I trained for the Boston Marathon two years ago, this is the run I did not get to do because I was nursing an IT band injury then, and it makes me look forward to this run even more.