Its pumped me up a bit when I received my confirmation email from the Philadelphia Marathon folks the other day … it contained all the final information for the pre-race, the post-race and beyond and it kind of reminded me that this race is just 8 days out now. I also got my bib number (4042) and then got a good chuckle out of the fact that I estimated my finish time to be 3:41-3:50 when I registered back in the early summer.. yeah, ok. This means i’m going to be in the wrong corral for the start of the race because your color is based on your estimated finish time, but as they suggested for these types of situations, I can work my way to the back of the corral if I estimated wrong. It is a waved start, so I may decide not to move, who knows. I don’t expect to finish in less than 4:05 at this point unless I have a real great day (which could happen, depending on the couse).

I’ve already started to plan my logistics, even though I don’t head out for another week yet. Its not a long trip to the hotel i’m staying in thankfully, maybe 45 minutes to Center City Philly from where i’m at (without traffic).. my big dilemma right now is whether I drive to the start on race day, or just walk the mile over to the start. The only downfall of walking over is that I have to walk back after the race (which could be a struggle in itself), but if I drive, I have to get there really early and fight for parking (and its expensive too, no freebies in Philly). I dunno, I guess its just a small thing in the grand scheme of the race logistics. The expo looks pretty big though, probably the same size as the Baltimore marathon’s was, with official race gear available .. (my favorite). I think I’ve written before that I don’t attend the pasta dinners the night before the race, I’m not into gorging myself with pasta the night before the race, it always causes me stomach distress… its funny but the food that always works for me is a turkey club sandwich.. its weird, but I always have a good race after a turkey club. I really like to just stick to my routine the night before and relax in the evening and hit the sack early …

So this morning was my last real long run before the race next weekend, and every run gets a little shorter as we get closer now. I got in 14.3 miles in just over 2 hours. The weather right now is kind of weird with the remnants of Hurricane Ida lingering around the southeast part of Pennsylvania. We didn’t get the real heavy rain like the Jersey shore did, but still have the wind, which makes it pretty cool. Days like today remind me that as I head into the winter, I have to not assume that just because the TV and my computer tells me that its 51 degrees out, that it actually feels like 51 degrees. It was nice out when the wind wasn’t blowing today, but the wind was always pretty much blowing for the entire run, so it made it much cooler. At times the wind was up to 15-20 MPH … very impressive.

I do have to say that the final longer run felt good for the most part, I always seem to start to struggle around this time of year with motivation, so I have to work to keep it together for one more week. This is the latest i’ve ever trained into the year, with the closest being for the Harrisburg marathon back in 2007. I guess you can say that i’m tired of getting up in the morning, tired of eating good all the time, tired of just being tired and tired of being sore … its safe to say i’m almost burnt out from training, it’ll be nice to kick back for a few weeks and enjoy the simple things again. I took a look back to previous years even in my blog here, and my posts tend to drop off in November and December, so its definitely a trend (that I intend to break this year)!

I’ve calculated that I’ve run 1570 miles since May 11th when I started marathon training for the year. Thats 27 weeks of training, so that averages almost 58 miles a week … gosh, that could be why i’m burnt out… thats a lot of miles.

So the worst part of starting to lose that motivation is I am finding myself starting to eat more stuff that I shouldn’t … I fear that i’m going to put on weight before the race, although with only a week to go, I can’t imagine i’ll put that much weight on, but still. Someone brought in these apple cinnamon buns to work yesterday, and I just couldn’t resist them … they’re probably not the worst thing in the world to eat, but they’re bad enough when you eat like 4 of them.

Tomorrow I’ll write up my tapering plan for the week as I attempt to rest my body for the last marathon of the season … I have tons of stuff to get done today, so there isn’t much rest expected today, but tomorrow is definitely a day of rest.