Final preparations

I wish I had better stuff to write about.  This has been a somewhat difficult week both physically & mentally.  The mental aspect has been a struggle mainly because I feel far from focused right now.  Nothing overly stressful or burdensome but work and life have been demanding of my mental energies right now and I simply haven't had the time to focus and mentally prepare for the race like I would prefer to right now.  Perhaps that's why my mind started wandering this morning about things I haven't done yet after my pager went off at 1am so I had to get up to tackle a few last minute work details before we leave (in about 25 hours) and still don't feel like I could fall back to sleep so I need to ramble some things off with this blog. 

Oftentimes the best time for me to focus on a race is while I'm working out.  Many things occupy my mind while working out; one frequent tendency is running through the scenarios of how the race could play out but my workouts have been lousy for the past two weeks and I can't focus on the race if I can barely get myself moving to a normal pace.  My legs are still dead (which I'm fine with at this point) but I'm also limiting myself given a minor foot injury.

This foot problem wouldn't ordinarily be anything to write home about.  Typically I would modify my training a little, do more swimming & biking, wear better shoes, and be done with it after a week or two.  I have a slight sprain of a flexor tendon in one of my toes and a bone bruise in an adjacent part of my foot likely caused by me running slightly different from the first injury.  It doesn't really slow me down but I'm trying to get it better before the race as one of the limiting factors in the running speed for this race is the heavy legs and constant ache on the feet after all those miles and I know any change in gait given even the slightest of injuries will make tolerating that even worse.  It's not the after that concerns me.  I'll have plenty of time to rest.  It's the last 10 miles of the marathon that this gets the worst and I don't want to approach the race with a sore foot if possible.  There are certainly worse things that could be going on right now so this is still certainly minor but just a constant battle this week of trying to get off my legs but that really isn't an option with work and with packing for the race.

Sorry for the rambling this morning.  After getting some work emails out and updating this it's now about 4:25 am and I feel a little sleepiness setting in so I'm going to take advantage while I can.  It must be a pretty lousy blog if it's even putting the writer to sleep.  The pool will be calling in about 2 hours.