ground control to major tom...

take your protein pills and put your helmet on...
wow, the body is suffering wildly. the feet hurt, the hips are locked and my stride has lost it's way. i'll need more than protein pills and a crash helmet to get through this one.

commencing countdown, engines on...
19 days to race day. what to do? want to keep the fitness and confidence going into the race but don't want to be blown out standing on the starting line with 113 miles to go.

and I'm floating in a most peculiar way
and the stars look very different today...
what a difference a few weeks can make. i was feeling relatively strong and enjoying most of the miles i'd been running, but now it just hurts and frankly isn't a whole lot of fun. i've been procrastinating writing a post here because i don't have a whole lot of positive news to report on the running end of things, but the idea behind this blog was for people to follow the journey as mike and i try and find our way in a whole new world of training and racing that is transrockies. it isn't always pretty and we'd be sugar coating the story if all we wrote about was how fantastic we felt and excited we were each morning to get out and ravage our body and mind. the good, the bad, the ugly, as promised.

your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
can you hear me, major tom?
hmm...depends who you ask i suppose. talk to five friends and i'll get five different opinions of a game plan for the next three weeks. i started hitting some lighter strength work on the hips and hamstrings last week and that's already resolved the tightness and cramping that had been lingering around since our 3-day effort a month ago. i don't think i'm going to resolve my hip issues before the race but hopefully i can buy some time and get through the next few weeks without finding myself nursing a more serious injury.

planet earth is blue
and there's nothing I can do
you gotta roll with the punches. i'm still excited about transrockies and the story wouldn't be nearly as interesting or memorable if everything were easy.


though i'm past one hundred thousand miles
i'm feeling very still
and i think my spaceship knows which way to go

rob