home for an island

Total number of runs: 57
Total number of miles: 358.05
Total time: 49 hours, 30 minutes, 15 seconds

I've now spent over 48 hours training for this marathon.

Apparently, 18 miles is a breeze. I ran without Lisa this past Sunday (due to an alcohol induced foot injury) and did really well. The first few miles took about 10 minutes per, but eventually I found a comfortable stride and ran strong through 12 miles. Here, I pulled my new ace: Gu Performance Gel. I took one of these at the 12 mile mark, and another one at 15 miles, and never looked back. There wasn't a surge of energy that I could detect, but despite my rather large pace increase, there wasn't any new fatigue either. These things essentially allowed me to go a lot faster with no consequences - awesome!

Kayleigh came to visit over the weekend and Laura and I entertained her while she was here. I was sad when she left in December so it was nice to have her come visit us. We all tentatively made plans to visit her in the Addirondaks this summer.

I had some very lofty plans to paint 8 Glade Guard before leaving for California on Saturday morning, but they've fallen pretty short. The idea was to paint one color a day (flesh, secondary green, primary green, and brown) over the course of four days, and have 90% of the models done when I left. The flesh and secondary green went on just fine, but Laura and I went climbing last night, and followed that up with some beer at the Behan, so last night was a wash. Tonight is movie night, which means that I won't be able to paint anything else before we leave. Oh well.

EMS had a very large pack on sale for $100, which I bought yesterday to use on this trip. I also bought a dozen carabiners to turn into draws. I'm getting more and more excited about this trip as it gets closer.

Joel is still rocking my socks off in chess (I'm currently 0 - 5, with a 6th loss coming right up). My book arrived in the mail, so some quality reading time on the plane should help my game a bit.