Missing scenes

OBX.

Ahhhh.

What a time. What an experience. What friends. What a beautiful slice of the coast. What running fun. And above all else, what a tribute!

Joey was remembered well. We sang Happy Birthday to him, we felt him among us --- in the ocean, while running, while laughing, while living. Kath made some super cool medals for all of us, Chris fashioned some sweet armbands, and everyone pitched in on creating signs to post along the course (pictures to come). I cannot properly express what it means to me to have this group of friends and to have some of my family there as well, sharing in the experience! I am rich beyond words.

As for the running, I stuck to my plan with keeping the full as a training run & was lucky enough to have my little bro with me the entire way. And although my tummy sloshed a bit in the first half, I never felt physically hurtin'. However, I wasn't there mentally. Somewhere around mile 16 a light went off.

What exactly am I training for?

Sure I am registered for CIM on 12/6 and I also registered last minute for Rocket City (12/12) as a back-up, but am I ready? Is this run in OBX really a step towards one of those two races? A phrase that I've held in my mind recently came from Chris Lear's Running With The Buffaloes. Wetmore tells his runners to make a movie in your mind - the movie contains all aspects of the race you've worked towards. Your training prep, the course, your execution, etc.

I then attempted to make a movie in my mind.
The movie is incomplete, there are missing scenes.

I pretty much decided right then and there that I had to reconsider racing a marathon next month.

I want to do this right. I want to be able to make the masterpiece in my mind AND on the road. I am not able to do this right now and I have nothing to prove attempting to force the issue when it's well outside of my character to do.

The good news - I'm READY to make it right. I've been consistently logging my miles w/out any quality [yet] and I can feel my body responding positively. After over a year of being somewhat healthy and injured and somewhat not, I'm strong, I know the formula for me. I want to work with Lloyd all the way through this thing so any previous pitfalls might be avoided, training techniques improved upon and levels raised to where they should be. Of course these thoughts had to have lived in the back in my mind somewhere... they didn't just magically appear at mile 16 in OBX. Most certainly that race was the impetus and just having allowed them to come out and, further, to discuss them with some of the folks at OBX (Missy in particular) and later Lloyd, felt like a huge load off my mind.

So here I am. Sticking with consistent mileage for now, adding in some other fun stuff during the base building phase and looking for a spring marathon to strut my stuff.