Gearing Up......

I actually did not intend for the title of this post to be a pun, but I suppose sometimes you just have to go with it.

Don & I are packing up & about to head to Napa, where we will do as much wine tasting as is reasonable for a person running a marathon the next morning, have a pasta dinner in Calistoga, & crash in an obscenely overpriced hotel room about a mile from the start of NVM. The plan is for me to jog to the start & then for Don to meet me at the finish in Napa around 11am. (I don't explicitly have a time goal, but three hours and fifty minutes is the absolute longest I have ever run non-stop and, honestly, I don't really want to finish much past four hours.)

**(Update: Um. So I just found out that apparently Don got us a reservation at Morimoto instead. Not exactly sure how he managed it, but I am beyond thrilled. :) )**

For all that I'm taking it easy with this race, I'm still kind of excited about it. Assuming there are no catastrophes (fingers & toes crossed), I feel like just finishing 26 miles at any pace will be getting over a bit of a mental hurdle for me.

The weather looks good so far, 43ish at the 7am start in Calistoga & only 60ish in Napa by 11am, a light breeze, & no precipitation in sight.

The only downside is that they are predicting full sun, so I'm still planning to treat it like a hot race. (I've run part of that course in full sun between 8 & 10ish, and it definitely felt significantly warmer than it was.) Still, NVM has had its share of 80+ temps and pouring rain in the past, so I'm feeling pretty lucky with the current forecast.

Having been running in Kinvara 5's now for 8-9 months, I've learned a few things about them.

1) They're the best long run shoe I've ever worn, bar none;

2) they'll go 500+ miles (for me) with no problem, BUT

3) they're only really comfortable for 2+ hours for the first 200 miles or so, & after that it's just too much pressure on the ball of my foot.

At this point I now have three pairs: A pair with 500+ miles that I only wear for easy runs up to 5-6 miles, a pair with a little over 200 miles that's fine up to say 10 miles, and a brand-new pair that I bought last week because I was just having too much ball-of-foot discomfort with the other ones & didn't feel good about spending four hours in them on Sunday.

(I did run in them all this past week just to make sure there were no weird surprises.)

Oh, and since they only make these shoes in three color schemes, all of which are pretty hideous, I've been working my way from least to most offensive & now own a pair in every vomitous hue.

If Saucony screws up version 6 when the inevitable update comes and I am forced to buy up every pair of the 5's I can find in my size, I may actually cry. (Thankfully, word on the street is it will most likely be just an upper update so YAY.)

I've been doing my long runs in my Oiselle Distance shorts (I know.....but they work really, really well and have a metric shitte-tonne of pocket space). In the past I've suffered some real angst about where to safely & comfortably store enough gels for getting me through a marathon, but for my birthday a few days back my sister sent me this cool thingie called a FlipBelt, which I had never heard of:

Now, my sister is not a runner & suffers her own constant angst around finding suitable gifts for me, so she was like, "I dunno, it looked like a thing you could use, you can return it if you want!" I took it on a long run fully packed up with gels to see how it worked, though, and I was kind of amazed.

It was comfortable, stayed in place, & because there's no zipper or anything, getting gels in & out of it was super easy. (Actually, it was so comfortable that I eventually forgot I was wearing it.) Even filled up with gels, it doesn't even give you any weird spare tire look!

So I think it's going to be four gels in the pockets and six in the FlipBelt on Sunday. (Plus, it made my sister really happy that I liked it.)

Friends, I will catch you on the flip side of this bitch. Wish me luck! :D