Preparing for My First Ultra

My first ultra is less than 3 weeks away now and I'm getting pretty excited. Jennifer and the girls will be coming down with me this year and we're going to make a weekend camping trip out of it. So cool! Training has been going really good and I'm feeling really strong. I'm doing my pushups religiously and building my base up for the hills of Hocking. However, I may have sprung a slight injury in my right ACL last week... I've been worrying about it pretty bad and concerned how it will affect my training and ultimately my race.

So, this morning I was catching up on my blog roll and found a cool post that helped me convince myself I can still do this thing. I stumbled upon an old post from the iRunFar blog, titled Ultra Advice From a Master. I faintly remember when it was posted last year, but at the time I was only doing 5k's, so I had little interest in the advise and didn't really read it. It had a whole new meaning to me today when I found it on a whim... Best yet, I saw comments on this post from two of my buddy-bloggers (Olga & Jamie). :)

While reading through the tips, number 6 was the one that stuck out the most for me:

6. Don't over train AND taper well....your base is well established and you will be better off rested than running a lot up to the race even though you may think you are not in the best of shape. Muscle memory is there for those who have run a lot over the years.

My Sunday long run this past weekend was supposed to be 25 miles, but I was only able to do a little over 9 miles, for I didn't want to completely shoot my chances for running the race. My right ACL was pulling pretty bad and all hills were totally out of the question. It's feeling surprisingly better today and I'm scheduled for an easy 4 miler; I'm anxious to see how it holds up. I'll admit, I've been getting pretty discouraged since my Sunday run, but I'm not letting it get me down and out completely. Since revisiting the iRunFar post, I've decided to downsize this weeks miles and I've reduced my Sunday run from 30 miles to a 20 miler instead before my taper week. I figure I have enough training behind me to finish 37 miles fairly easy. Especially since I'm not going for a time; finishing will be no problem.

Notice the optimism here. :)