It's this month now!!

Freaky eh!! It's nearly time! I want to say that its scary that the countdown is in single digits and in the final week but its not, its exciting!! I am looking forward to getting to Taupo and doing all that pre-race stuff that we need to do and by golly there is a lot of it to do!!

I am however finally quite sick of cycling around ChCh, this time last year I had never done that round around the back of the airport now I have done it more times than I can count and will be quite happy to not do it for quite sometime. I think doing it twice in one day was what tipped me over the edge! It was really nice this week to have some shorter rides and just blast out to Sumner and back.

Last week I did the rather controversial 5 hour run. Never before has a run been discussed so much! Haha, I think nearly everyone knew that I had to do a 5 hour run and all had varying thoughts on it which made for some interesting conversations, some of these were weekly with Richard for the past however many weeks since he put it in my program. I was a little challenged when deciding where to go so I was very boring and ran the ChCh marathon course. I did this for a few reasons, I live on it so it is nice and easy to get to (just walk down the drive!), its 2 laps which is similar to Taupo and after several chats with Richard he was keen for me to do the distance and although I have read lots of info to the contrary I did agree with him a bit on this one. Plus I think you have to trust the coach sometimes and he has never put me wrong before and there is no way he would put me wrong 2 weeks before the event I have been training more than 12 months for, so I just followed the plan. I loaded up my fuel belt and after loading some water bottles and extra gels into the letterbox I headed out on the only warm day we had all week. The plan was to just take it easy, the run after all was only planned with an RPE of 3 so its not as if I had to smash it out. The first lap went ok, at the start of lap 2 I started to feel a bit 'can't be arsed' so decided to just lap around the river and head home. Then I remembered that saying I had read the day before 'its always to soon to quit' so figured I better suck it up and get on with it. By this time I really wanted coke and something salty so I told myself I could stop at the dairy on Colombo St as I would only have about 9km to go then. And yes I stopped and bought potato chips and coke and its highly likely I was seen hot-footing it down Kilmore St in my running kit complete with compression socks and fuel-belt scoffing chippies while holding a bottle of coke in my other hand! hahaha! It worked a treat tho and I feel pretty positive about the run now that I have the full marathon distance under my belt. I'm also pretty pleased at how quick I recovered. I was feeling normal by Wednesday, had my first run on Friday and that went really well so the plan seems to have worked!

Now all thats left to do is start packing! My bike and transition bag complete with helmet, shoes, wetsuit etc are loaded into Turps' car for their journey north. My girl is in good company with Zarnia's pretty new baby and Iain's flash bike! She had her service the other day and I took her for a spin today and she is running beautifully smoothly!! She's like new again :)

So far I'm still feeling quite calm about the whole thing, the nerves haven't kicked in yet which I'm thinking is a good thing as I still have heaps to do and it will be easier to get things done while I am still able to focus on the tasks at hand.

Bring on race day I say!! Woohoo!!