Week 14 & 15 - Here I Come Chicago!

Here I am, and it's week 15. My last long week of running, but I need to talk about last week first.

I was pretty on last week, I'm not gonna lie. I had a 4+ miler on Monday and felt like I really attacked it. I'm surprised at how quickly I feel like I've acclimated to the environment here for running. I ran the 4 in under 31 minutes. That's about as good as I was doing at home, plus I've got hills to deal with here. It's amazing to me how aggressive my approach can feel on some of these runs. Sometimes I'm just trying to get through it, and others I feel like I'm taking that run and bending it over my knee and showing it who's boss. I'm boss, bro.

Twice I attempted to run the 10 mile, and the first time I got caught up watching some intramural soccer games while on my route. I watched for so long that I got completely cold and my muscles were rigid, so I stopped by Mike's on the way and he gave me a ride to finish it off. By that point at least I had already run 6. I did the same thing the next night, but rather than wuss out, I just picked up and started running even though I had stopped in colder evening weather for at least a half hour. Both times were pretty good, and thankfully, I didn't have any of the same bowel problems as I did the week prior.

Week 14 was a stepback week so the long run on Saturday was only 14 miles. I'm doing a terrible job these days at getting to bed at a decent time prior to these long runs. Nevertheless, I've still been able to turn in some good strong runs and have decent pacing. I have been feeling affected the last couple of weeks, however, by the lack of sleep on these runs. The last two weeks I've been running 14 and 19 miles on about 5 hours of sleep. Can't do that anymore.

Thanks again to those with suggestions for the cramping. I upped my intake of calcium with the calcium-fortified orange juice, popped even more multi-vitamins, had two bananas, and I didn't feel a thing after the run on Saturday, which is SO nice. It makes a huge difference making sure my electrolytes are up, I'm well-hydrated, and I have sufficient levels of calcium, potassium, and magnesium. It's kind of cool learning about those.

I'm not really going to get into week 15 running yet. But this week I booked my flight and today I booked my hotel reservation, so it's official. This week is the last long week of runs - 40+ miles, with a 20+ miler tomorrow. Yikes. But after tomorrow I get to taper, which I've been looking forward to for so long.

So there's only 23 more days until race day! I'm so excited to get to hang out Chi-town. I'll have to see if my boy Kanye is gonna be around that weekend.