42.4 Miles

This week. Lots of stuff going on, running still isn't at the forefront, but 40+ miles ain't bad, I suppose. The clock's now ticking towards closing on our house, which is a really sweet place. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that nothing (else) goes wrong, and that the place will be our's (or our bank's) in a matter of weeks. We'll have our own private pond, 7+ acres (with a trail going around which I'll mark out 400m), and oodles of other great stuff.

In the meantime, I have a serious running goal looming in the future: The Triennial, a trail relay along the Fingerlakes Trail which is very close to where we'll be living. It's tough to train specifically for this at the moment, since there are no serious trails to speak of in Chicago, but some decent aerobic building should be good, and I'm going to try to be hitting the weight room from time to time. Technical trail running really is a significantly different sport in comparison with road racing. There are muscle groups that you never knew existed until after a good trail race. The stabilizers are heavily recruited. When we arrive in NY, I'll have some time to hit the trails and get some good tempo style backwoods running in.

I'm starting to look forward to my new job, too. Teaching is something I really need to get back to. It gives structure to the life of research, which is inherently unstructured, and stop and start so far as progress is concerned. It will be busy though, and it's going to take some time to find out how to "git 'er dun."

Anyhow, now that home buying stress should be leveling off, I want to try and get back to the grindstone so far as training is concerned. 60+ weeks would be nice. We'll see what I can manage.