Preparations

This is my first post on my new laptop. After at least a month of deliberations, I decided to go with a Macbook Pro, the small one. It's a birthday/Christmas (they're close together for me) gift from my husband and parents; it seemed pricey and a rather breathless upgrade from its refurbished PC predecessor, but I was told that Macs are for artists and designers and thus I should have one, even if I do artistic stuff only part time.

What I actually have is the medium sized one with extra high def: the day I was to go to the store to get my machine, I received an unexpected scholarship. Its purpose was very clear.

Not that I can do much on this machine yet. I'm not sure it even has a word processing program, and I'll have to download ChemSketch and some sort of digital editing program, and stuff like that...

Anyway, Sunday's the big run! The extremely expansive Farewell to Ottawa escapade. I'm sort of starting to feel the excitement in a more concrete way, but I have been preparing:

No bodyrocking this week! I have to recover.
Lots of clamshells.
Lots of water.
Supplements, particularly iron.
chickpeas, lentils, that kind of thing
beet, carrot and ginger coleslaw. I think it could be considered a coleslaw, at any rate. It's shredded and rather satisfying.
Turkey soup. We had a 20 lb bird for Thanksgiving, and we boiled the leftovers for stock as usual. We don't buy a lot of meat, but we try to get it from good farms that feed and care for their animals properly (i.e., pasture-fed), and then we stretch the heck out of it. Then I picked the meat off the bones--a LOT of meat. I have to finish the soup tomorrow. This sort of thing takes a few days to make.
Basically, I'm trying to eat really well this week. Chia has helped--I have that instead of some nasty snack when I'm feeling hungry.
And, finally, sleep. Last night was adequate, but I'm hoping to be able to sleep more the rest of the week.

I have been running, of course:
15.5 miles on Saturday (a oddly tiring run, but usually the last long run is especially tiring despite the shorter distance).
6 miles on Sunday
3 miles on Monday
5.5 miles today, and it was a fast finish. I ran so fast at the end that my head hurt. The beginning of the run was as blah as most/all of my runs have been recently, but near the end, I started picking up speed, and once I got going, the mechanics improved incredibly, and though my lungs and mitochondria weren't quite up to the task, I clicked into something that felt perfect. I wasn't going in all directions, just forward, my core was solid, my feet were mostly off the ground, I had good lift, etc, etc, it was that proper form that I seek. It's so tantalizing: I'm able to maintain it for only a short time. I'm not sure how fast it is (the dog left his trot to go into a gallop), but I'm not trying to make the numbers the goal. Nor even race performance. What I want to do is recapture and prolong that elusive feeling of doing it right.

This won't happen on Sunday, but I hope to feel some sort of enlightenment, or at least change!

This post is a novel partly because the higher screen resolution gives me much more real estate, as other pixel pushers have put it!