The Motivator has gone live now with his own blog, 50 in 50 Marathon Quest!  If you’re into fast and long (running), stop by and say hello to James!!  Niki, be sure to give him lots of grief about the Blue and White Army, he’d love it!  🙂

This weekend pretty much sucked for just about anything and everything.  However, I had some fabulous runs midweek.  But I knew come Thursday night… after I had 3 great runs in a row and James ran into audio technical difficulties on Thursday evening… I just knew this weekend’s long run was going to be a bomb.  And it was.

The great Pacific Northwest had a massive storm moving in on Friday night.  After a long hot summer, James and I were both looking forward to running in the rain on Saturday morning!  He had 18 miles to conquer, I had 10.  But after his technical difficulties on Thursday night, James decided to get a new phone on Friday.  He didn’t prepare it for running until Saturday morning, right before he was to head out.  (Doesn’t that just scream “bad idea” all over the place?)  The headphones wouldn’t sync, the watch wouldn’t sync, the phone wouldn’t fit in the running belt… everything that could’ve gone wrong with a new phone did.  But after faffing around with it for an hour or more, James was finally out the door. I wasn’t far behind.

When I finally got out, I wasn’t feeling it.  The morning had been full of turmoil, and I am usually “centered” and in total “zen” when I head out the door.  Not today.  I got about a mile up the trail, the wind started picking up, the sky looked scary, and I said, “Oh bugger this!” and turned around, headed home, with plans to make up my run tomorrow.  Hey, I still did 2 miles.

James didn’t have a choice.  He absolutely had to run that 18 miles on Saturday as he was leaving for a business trip on Sunday.  He only has 41 days until Chicago, and he was hell bent on getting the mileage in.  By the time he turned around on the trail, he was at mile 13, still had 5 miles to run, and ran into 60 mph head winds.  He got super tough and didn’t let the wind “win,” and just continued on.  He made it.  Safe and sound.  18 miles, with 5 of them running into the wind.  Wow.

Needless to say, the entire area lost power from these winds.  Trees came crashing down, power lines snapped, crews were working around the clock.  Our particular town was without power for about 18 hours (at the time of my writing, there are still people without power in Snohomish and King County, 60 hours into it).  Grocery stores lost all their frozen and refrigerator goods… but even with the power out, they were still selling wine.  So how does one entertain one’s self in a power outage?  You pretend you’re camping!!  And drink!!  We made it through just fine.  Below is a picture of James cooking us dinner on a camping burner we had obtained during the last huge power outage here in 2006.  He’s on our front porch because it was absolutely pissing down of rain and our front porch provided cover.  The light was courtesy of a huge flashlight and candles.

Cooking by candlelight! Outside! On a Bunsen burner!

Then came Sunday morning, the night after a bottle of wine, after waking at 5:30 a.m. to say goodbye to James, after a day of complete and utter discombobulation.  I was kinda-sorta ready to try for the 10 miles again.  I hit the trail and, all of a sudden, there was a sh*t-load of bicycles coming at me.  Group by group by group.  And downed trees with branches and leaves everywhere.  I had to hurdle the branches in order to miss the cyclists!  I could only manage 6 miles with having to dodge all the bikes and the debris and because, quite frankly, I had had enough of this weekend.  After my 6 miles, I went home and went back to bed and cut my losses.  I was done.

So, now I have 3 long runs left before my race… I will run 10, 11, 12, then the big 13.1.  Am I nervous about it?  Absolutely yes.  Will that stop me?  Oh hell no.  Because even though I’m working hard to bring my pace down, at the end of the day, I know I will eventually… but in the meantime, I’m bringing my bling home even if I have to crawl across that finish line.

BTW… the cycling event that was happening today was The Ride to Conquer Cancer, riding from Vancouver, BC, to Bellevue, WA.  They raised over 8 million dollars.  I was honored to have to hurdle fallen trees in order to make way for that wonderful group of cyclists.

I didn’t hurdle this one… I walked around it. 🙂

Debris everywhere. I don’t know how those cyclists managed it.

These leaves were green yesterday, I swear!

This one’s just cool… more leaves turning colors though.