Friendly Reminder

In my email inbox today, I received a reminder email from Active.com that I have a race coming up this weekend. Does anyone else find that a little odd? I know it's a generic mass emailing, but does anyone really "forget" they have a 50k race coming up? Maybe they should stop sending silly emails and reduce the fees for signing up online. Active.com is approaching Ticketmaster in how absurd the charges and fees are.

Once again I'm going into a race unprepared. I blame it on the house. Before we owned a house and started remodeling, I was training consistently and still able to rest on the weekends. Now with a house, more friends and neighbors, and actually living with my husband, I devote much less time to training. Ah, life. I'm looking at Psycho Psummer as a fun run to enjoy the recently weed-wacked course and as heat training. If it goes well, I'll run hard the second loop. If not, I'll be happy to finish.

But for the Heartland 50 miler, I have a plan. I recently met another runner who is similar age and running capability (except she's fast) who is trying to qualify for Boston this fall (did I mention she's fast?). I've talked to her about doing tempo runs or speed work together once a week. So that instantly increases the amount of quality runs by about 1000%. I'm hoping if we start off with 5 mile tempo runs I'll be able to keep up with her.

I also found out that the downtown airport road is once again open, so on Mondays I'm going to take my bike to work and ride after work 22-26 miles. All that is left is to swim on Wednesdays and use my weekends for back-to-back long runs. I may be running by myself more, too. As a morning person, I'll get up and out the door faster than DH and much less likely to bag an early morning run if he's out of town. Funny how that works. I'm also considering a pacer for Heartland, other than DH. I have a time goal in mind and if I can work towards it, a pacer on the last few miles might be really nice.

I'm committed to racing Heartland and racing Heartland well.