One Week to Go!

What a week! It started off with my 12 miler last weekend. Nothing interesting there, other than I ran the whole thing. I was a little worried because my left knee has been bothering me since the 21 miler two weeks ago. It doesn't hurt other than when I'm running, but I managed to work through it. Same with the right Achilles'... still excruciating pain for the first mile then it mostly disappears.

Then there was Monday. I started off pretty excited because we had several friends who were running the Boston Marathon and I was following them via the email updates. On my way home from work, I heard the tragic news of the bombings and panicked. I know our friends were done running, but they are the kind of people who stand a the finish line and cheer on others just for the heck of it and I knew they'd want to soak in the activities of the day. Fortunately, after about an hour of texts and Facebook messages, we found out our friends were okay. I'm still in shock about what took place there, but words cannot describe what I'm feeling--disgust at the suspects, confusion, pride for our fellow Americans willing to help, scared for the future, anger--I'm feeling it all.

I had to keep on with my training for the marathon. I'm not sure what to do because of my knee and Achilles' so this week I took it a little easier and did my miles on the elliptical. It doesn't seem to bother my knee as much and I'm hoping the non-impact will help in the long run, literally :)

This weekend I had 8 miles on the schedule and felt I needed to do an actual run this week. So I took to the country roads yesterday and try to bear the wind. Wow, was it windy! Luckily, the route I had planned out had the wind at my back the second half, which was completely different than last week's run. I had the wind at my face the last 6 miles last week. BRUTAL! Anyway, I felt really good during yesterday's run. My knee bothered me--I could feel it-- but it wasn't so much that I had to stop or anything. In fact, my pace was much faster than I have been (power of taper!)

So, I have a week to go. One week from today, I will be running my first marathon. How has it gone? Okay... I keep telling people that this will be the only marathon that I do, but a trail marathon has been brought to my attention and I'm considering it... The problem is that I'm so slow and the training runs get to 4 1/2-5 hours and that's a long time to be away from home and the kiddos.  I don't mind going out and doing a 2 hour run with friends because I know I need to be healthy and get out, but I feel selfish if I go out for 5 hours just for a run. Plus, I don't like how I feel after the long runs. I want to sit down, prop my feet up, and maybe take a nap while icing my knee and ankle. I limp around all the time and just want to get healed. We'll see what the future holds. Right now I'm going to pick some shorter distances (5k's), and maybe a fall half marathon. We'll see about that trail marathon....