The weekend ahead

Before I start I want to send out my thoughts to Ben Hian and wish him a speedy recovery. Even though I did not have a chance to meet him at the SD race I have only heard wonderful things about Ben and hope one day I get a chance to meet him and when he is healthy again run with him. He was a great trail runner and champion back in the day before I even thought about running. He put in a gutsy performance at SD given the fact that he took 11 years off of running and that was his first 100 miler since the layoff. The whole thing did teach me a lesson in that this is only running and even though we pushed our bodies to the extreme and some point we must listen to them. Best of luck Ben and hope to see you soon.

Speaking of listening to the body if all goes according to plan this weekend it will be 7 straight days of running for me; which if you know me is something that I do not do very often nor enjoy. I really like to break it up with swimming, spinning, weights and core but if I am going to see myself running with the likes of Ben, Jorge, Scott, Hal... I need to find the hills and keep running them - we will see how that goes.

This morning I was to get up and go for a swim and hit the weights but I decided to listen to my body and give it the rest that it deserves. This evening is the run from Chantry Flats to the Finish for a total of 26 miles and then I will drive home get a few hours of sleep and drive back to run Chantry to the Finish with another group of runners. 2 loops and 52 miles out of Chantry so I need to be well rested. For both runs I will be testing a new version of Succeed's Amino drink so hopefully that goes well or else the runs could be in trouble. For you ultra runners no pun intended.

Finally - huge congratulations to the US Men and Women for their performance at the 100km race in Belgium. The women dominated and Kami took first and Devon took fourth and the US women overall won the gold. Kind of hard to top that. Here is a link for a little recap of the results from ultrarunning

http://www.ultrarunning.com/ultra/features/news/semick-us-women-take-gold.shtml