All Over the World

Not the ELO song, but that new addiction I told you I would have.  Following my blog stats.  I would imagine that through the power of Twitter, this blog is being exposed to people all over the world.  Over the past three days, many check-ins from Brazil, Turkey, France, Germany, and Kazakhstan have shot the pageviews higher than ever!  So, thanks to all of you who are reading, and tell your friends.  I hope you enjoy this tale of a fat guy who is running, thus the name of the blog, This Fat Guy is Running.

Today was the biggest challenge that I have faced so far.  12 miles.  The Dirty Dozen.  Mentally, all week I had felt that I was ready to roll with this distance.  Of course, getting out there and doing it is completely different than thinking about it.  As I've said time and again, I think that a lot of this distance running business is mental.  When attempting a distance of this magnitude for the first time, it can be a little bit daunting.  I won't lie.  I was pretty overwhelmed at the thought of 12 miles once I got out to the lake this morning.  And this overwhelming feeling impacted my run.  It would be tough for it not to do that.  What it did was make me want to ease up the pace so that I could ensure that the distance would be covered, and that I wouldn't start off too quickly and crash and burn.  Unfortunately, I just don't run that way.  I've gotten to the point that I would prefer to run hard and "leave it all out there" (how cliche) as opposed to saving my energy to make sure that I finished.  So this sort of messes with my thought process, and it affects the run. 

Once I started out, I kept second guessing if I was taking it too easy.  My legs had not yet felt warmed up, so that played small part, but something did not feel right.  Maybe I was too distracted by the game tonight.  Whatever it was, I felt sluggish.  That is not something I can not afford to do next Saturday for the race.  As for the course today, I ran a couple of miles around the South end of Lake Shawnee that I had yet to see.  This area went all the way around the golf course, and past the camping area, a full 5 miles from the dam. It was very challenging, which was actually kind of nice, and once I hit the halfway point, I felt pretty good overall.  I was sore, of course, but I think I got back into the right frame of mind by having to really push it today.  Five miles is a nice run, for sure, but I don't think I'm working as hard as I need to when I do it.  I had to work hard today.  The best thing, by far, about hitting 12 today is that 13.1 next week will really not seem so difficult, especially with thousands of people running with me to keep my adrenaline and excitement flowing.  That really is going to be an awesome experience, and I can't wait.

As for the overall results pages from the race last Saturday, they still have not been posted.  I'm not sure if they ever will be posted, if they are, I will post them here and we can analyze what they looked like.  Until then...Later.  And EMAW.