Well, I'm less than two weeks away now from Twin Cities, and I must say, I'll be quite glad when all this training is over. I'm ready to take a few weeks off of running and let my feet/legs heal. Speaking of feet: I've had mixed feelings during recent training about the status of my right leg. As I've posted, I had a lot of pain in my right foot throughout Helsinki training and the marathon. This pain must have caused me to run oddly or compensate because during and after the race I had this weird knotty pain in the back of my right knee/top of my calf muscle. I felt good after my 12 mile run post-marathon, but a week ago I ran 15 with a lot of foot and calf/back of knee pain that lasted well into the week and got worse during some shorter runs. I'm not sure if it's a muscle or ligament, but no amount of stretching or massage seem to loosen it up. I was starting to get very concerned... This weekend I ran the Bolder Dash 10K, which went okay (and was fun!), but my calf was still really tight and sore during and immediately after the run (my foot pain wasn't too bad). Surprisingly, though, it felt quite a bit better on Sunday and today it hardly hurts at all. I'm planning on taking the next two weeks really easy, but I'm tempted to run a little to determine the status of this whole thing before the big day. I guess I'll just see how it goes and adjust as I need to. So that's the update for now. While I'm not looking forward to the actual running itself, I'm happy to be doing another marathon, and I'm excited to party after I'm done and I get a break.

School began today so this marks the true trial period for my training. Usually when I get home from school I just want to crash on the couch for about 5 hours. Now, however, I need to find to make it to the gym/out running, not to mention grad school and various other commitments. Sigh. I'm in the throes of figuring out some fund raising business with the PTA at my school. We'll see how that goes. There's about a month until the marathon and I'm optimistic. We'll see how long I can ride that optimism...