A Litany of Excuses

There’s lots of reasons why I haven’t blogged much recently. The main reason? I haven’t been running as much. Since the Fourth of July I have only run a single race, the Twin Cities Duathlon. I was pleased with my performance in the 5k run – 18mi ride – 5k run race, both of my 5k’s were around 23:00. Otherwise not much in my running world. Here’s why:

July was actually a pretty good month. Almost 150 miles of running in. August started off horrible. At the beginning of the month I got the bright idea to do a Friday run barefoot. Normally I do not run on Friday and I do not run barefoot. Needless to say, this did not end well. After 1.3 miles my feet were bloodied and blistered. I could barely walk for the next four days.

I managed to come back a week later with a 20 miler and a good solid week, but then I got the norovirus that I lovingly spread to my wife because I thought it was non-contagious food poisoning. If you haven’t ever had the norovirus, here’s how it works. First, it lies in wait for a day or two. Then it cleans EVERYTHING out of you from both sides and makes sure you can’t take anything else down. Then you’re just left dehydrated and exhausted for a week after. Thus, I missed a whole week of runs.

At the end of the norovirus week I did a 17 mile run and the next day was the duathlon. My knee was killing me, so I took a few days off. Did a 5 miler then a 20 miler. My knee still hurt. To cap off the 20 miler I went and boarded a plane for Europe that evening and spent two weeks in Europe. I didn’t run at all in Europe. Lots of walking, but no running. This was probably a good thing. After some long days of “museum walking” for eight to twelve hours my legs were killing me. Running would have been bad.

I returned to New York yesterday night. This weekend called for a 20 miler, I’m not jumping right into that. I’m going to build some mileage this week after my nice early morning six miles today. On Saturday I’ll run the Fifth Avenue Mile and then on Sunday I’ll do a 20 miler.

This leaves me with a very short taper for Chicago. I had hoped to peak there, now I’m just hoping to finish. Life is like that. I love Chicago, I’m going to love the race. I just won’t be down around 3:30 for it.