The day before .......

It's Saturday and the day before the race.

On the way to the airport, the traffic build up due to the accident on the other side of the road on the Gateway didn't phase us. We had left a little earlier than we normally would. The slow moving coffee line that Katy had to abandon as our flight was about to board wasn't a big deal. We had just sat down in the back of the plane when Katy turned to me and said "I think I left my IPod in the plastic tray that went through the X-Ray screen as we passed the metal detectors" ........... I quickly told the flight attendant and Katy "salmoned" off the plane and sprinted back to the security gate.

Katy returned, IPod lost, and soreness in her legs from bolting the full length of the airport. It wasn't her ideal preparation for the 10K that afternoon.

When we got to the hotel, she napped for a couple of hours whilst I joined Glenno, Nick and Eddie for some carbo pasta lunch. When I returned from lunch Katy was up and refreshed ready to run and pose for action photos whist nailing a pretty decent time.

I met a couple of Bloggers that day, Robert Song, Eddie and CJ. All day my mind was in MELTDOWN.
I would have liked to be more chatty and it was too late remembering that I owed CJ a hug from Susan. I really wasn't thinking anything ......... if you went inside my mind there would be a vast wasteland of nothing. I remember a conversion with Tesso about eating and being up in the morning early enough for the body to "get going" and how regular fibre consumption was reduced in the last few days to slow things down in that department. Running should be kept for the legs.

In the last days I managed to ensure I was well hydrated. I wanted to be excited and optimistic about my run but kept all that back so that I didn't run my race before I had started. I wasn't sure what was going to happen out on the road and had settled on a plan to go out with the 3:15 pacer and drift away early hoping to stay there through to the end, and if it turned out they picked me up late in the race, to tag along and finish around that time. A realistic assessment of my training times knew that this marathon should not be far off my last one in terms of finishing. Anything significantly quicker was over my physical threshold. It was an early night and I slept soundly after a day with great relief that I was physically ready for the morning and had not caught a cold or sustained an injury in the last week.