Well I'm neck deep in my first week after getting back from Australia. In case you are wondering, no two weeks lounging around some of the prettiest country on the planet does not make you a faster runner, all it does is make you want to live in Australia in a hundred year old hotel in the middle of nowhere flying crop dusters and driving around in your ute with your trusty blue healer. Aside from getting back to the real world, the other thing that is significant about this week is that it marks exactly one month till the 2010 North Pole Marathon! I have sunk my teeth into training pretty solidly this week so far. I put in two sevens mile runs and did a 9.3 tonight. I'm finding that I'm quite a bit slower than I was before I left. Part of me thinks it is all the muscle mass that quietly dissolved watching the sun set on a sail boat ( I came back from vacation 8 pounds lighter than when I left); another part of me thinks that I just need to wrap my head around running again. All this week I have felt a touch of uncertainty setting out for each run. It is amazing how fast you forget what you are capable of. Most of my training has been on the same stretches of desert around the airport and the path has been continuously marked with my tacks. It must have rained a couple of times while I was away because not only is the desert soft and moist, there is no trace that I was ever there. Its amazing how fast that mean old desert can forget. I guess I never realized how much my own tracks meant to me, they were like a flag stuck in a beach proclaiming that I had already conquered that stretch of ground and that it was therefore safe. It reminds me of the first time I landed a taildragger on a dry lakebed with no windsock, centerline, or edges mowed in the grass. Aside from being forgetful, the desert just seems more hostile this week. The ground is soft and each footstep sinks solidly, the wind hasn't been shy and there have been sprinkles of rain. All of that adds up to seeming kind of hostile after sitting on a warm beach so pure that the harvested its sand to make the Hubble telescope mirror!
Long story short, I've got about three weeks to show that ol desert who's boss before the race (I'm planning to take it pretty easy the week before the race).
Aside from running I'm taking care of a bunch of the other details for the race. I finally booked my flights from LA to the UK. I already had tickets from the UK to Spitsbergen, and Richard has promised me a seat on the plane to the Pole (redeemable as soon as I pay my entry fee). I'm looking at the required equipment list and ordering all the bits I'm missing...including, you guessed it! Racing snow shoes! On top of that I'm still sending out sponsorship letters looking for some corporate bucks. I've put just about every penny I have towards the entry fee for the race and I'm still coming up short. (this is your que to click the sponsorspace link over on the side and send me a few bucks, every little bit helps. Thank you in advance ;)
PS Below is my run from tonight. Nothing to write home about, but it does put me back in the saddle.
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