After my easy day yesterday, I’m quite fired up to get back on the road again (surprising, eh?). I only rode the bike for 20 minutes and did some leg weights yesterday, I really wanted to take it easy. I feel pretty good today.

As usual, my pain this week seems to be my back … I think I slept on it wrong last night, and although its not killing me, its tweaking here and there, but nothing serious. I got an email from the steamtown marathon yesterday ..

Greetings from Steamtown where 1089 hearty souls have signed up for this year’s marathon. We are now projecting a field of 1900 by our October 8 race day.

Just dropping you a note with two quick updates:

1) We’re a bit behind on the printing of our confirmation packets. There are a few event details we need to finalize and we want to make sure we send you a confirmation packet with correct info. It now looks like packets will be mailed after Labor Day (of course, if you have received this e-mail it means you are officially registered).

However, we do expect to be able to post a pdf of the confirmation letter on our Web site shortly. The moment we do I’ll send you an e-mail so you can download the letter if you’d like.

2) I spoke with Around the World Travel today regarding hotel availability. Around the World has reserved blocks of rooms for marathon weekend. I was told that there are still rooms available in the blocks at the Holiday Inn Dunmore, Inn at Nichols Village, Ramada, Clarion Inn and Hampton Inn at Montage.

If your are desperately seeking lodging I suggest you go to www.steamtownmarathon.com and click on Lodging. There you’ll find a list that will tell you how many miles the above properties are from the finish line/bus pick up. You’ll also find other tips and contact numbers for booking a room.

That’s all for now. E-mail updates will be fast and furious as race day gets closer. If you’d rather not receive these e-mails just send us an e-mail (how ironic) asking us to remove you from our list.

Good luck with your training and stay safe on the roads.

Sincerely,
Jim Cummings
Asst. Race Director

Today’s Quote: “The human body can do so much. Then the heart and spirit must take over.” — Sohn Kee-chung, 1936 Olympic marathon champion

Ahhh, this is where I start to get pumped up for the race. I’m two weeks away from running the Swanzey Covered Bridge Half Marathon, which should probably be easy, but still a racing experience to test my endurance. Believe it or not, i’m less than 7 weeks away from the race. Its hard to think i’ve done almost 12 weeks of training, but I have learned and experienced alot in that timeframe.

My worst week is coming up, i’ll hit 50 miles this week, mostly made up of a 20-miler on Saturday and a 10 miler on Sunday, although i’m not as fearful of it as I was since this past weekend wasn’t that bad overall. I’m changing my course a little bit though because I can’t run the last 4-5 miles uphill, it was actually a 400-foot incline over 4 miles coming home on Saturday, no wonder I was dying! I think we’ll drive to Kingston and run the Avenue and surrounding areas where it is somewhat flat. I get concerned because i’m not doing downhill work, but at this point, I don’t have a choice, I have nobody to drive me to the top of a hill and drop me off.

Regardless, its a beautiful day today, should get a good 5-miler in the sunshine, and I have 10 miles scheduled tomorrow morning (early as always) … it sucks, but this is the last Wednesday I have to get up so early for a week or so (next week is a recovery week, only 6 mid-week miles)…. we’ll survive..