Traveling

On the plane now from LA to Honolulu, then Kona this evening.  So far, travel has gone on without much difficulty.  We have 3 flights to get there totaling 12 hrs airtime.  This past week the workouts have been brutal—not in a difficult sense, but in the sense of just being awful.  They have not been anything close to what I was hoping for.  I didn’t go hard and then easy as planned, I just went soft throughout.  As mentioned before I’ve been trying to stay off my feet and keep pressure off my left forefoot.  I fashioned a foot pad from tape to remove the pressure from my metatarsals which has helped a lot during the workday and a little with running.  Unfortunately I’ve cut all of my runs short the past two weeks to put less stress on it and refresh my legs.  This doesn’t make me feel very confident.  It just makes me feel weak. 

Usually with my taper I know it is going well because I start to get ornery.  I have difficulty standing still during my taper but force myself to do it anyway and it puts me in a foul mood.  With work commitments being what they’ve been, I haven’t had the luxury of standing still & thus, am looking for a break.  I don’t feel ornery right now, just feeble. (Melissa may beg to differ about the ornery part.)

I haven’t been able to give the mental attention I need to the past few weeks.  I’ve been in denial these past two weeks of the approaching race.  I imagine waking up & working out on the course tomorrow will be the awakening I’ve been looking for.

The most common question I’ve heard the past few weeks is “Are you ready?” 

Not yet.  I feel I would have been able to complete the race months ago but in reality I won’t feel ready until the morning I wad into the water before the canon goes off.  I don’t want to feel ready any sooner than that.  If I do feel that way I know it will be because I wasted time by tapering too soon and didn’t get in as much fitness work as I could have a couple weeks back.  Hopefully this foot injury is just getting me to rest so I can get my legs under me before the race.  It really isn’t important that I only ran five miles this morning rather than six.  It is important that I get to the starting line as healthy as possible.

The computer battery is going to die now so I’ll post this and try to give a new update later.  Thanks for reading.

For those interested, the race starts this Saturday, Oct 13 at 7am for me (pros go off at 6:30am).  That is 11:30 am and noon Chicago time.  It is streamed live on ironmanworldchampionship.com.  It will be shown on NBC on Saturday, Oct 27  at I believe 3pm.