Down with the Sickness

Hey, you know that thing everyone tells you about how your baby will bring home approximately 3.8 billion colds and viruses from daycare? Guess what? It's completely true! Baby Sam is a veritable petri dish of all sorts of fun bacteria and other such microscopic nasties that, being the loving son that he is, he's more than eager to share with his daddy. Long story short, I've been crazy kinds of sick lately, and it all capped off with a brutal weekend where I couldn't even think about putting on a pair of running shoes to race the Dahlgren 50K. Something about not having taken in any calories over the previous 30 hours made running 31 miles Saturday morning sound like a bad idea. The good news is, through no training effort at all, I'm back down to my race weight! Definitley file that one under #pyrrhicvictory, Twitter hipsters...

It's not all bad news, however, as I have a couple fun adventures coming up. First off, this weekend I'll be making my first trip ever out to run some popular routes in the Charlottesville, VA area with my buddy Andy. Friday will be my maiden voyage up The Priest and Three Ridges route, and after sleeping out on the trail, the following morning we'll head to C'ville itself to run the famous Rivanna Trail loop. Both of those routes have FKT's owned by Neal Gorman, and I'd love to head back out there this Fall to make a run at both of his stout record times. If nothing else, it'll be a good benchmark for my fitness level as I try to become a legit runner again.

Speaking of legit running, I'm happy to confirm that I'll officially be heading out to Texas in November to run the Ultracentric Gold Rush 24 Hour race. Some of you may recall I ran a previous version of Ultracentric on a different (and horrible) course back in 2008, but RD Rob Tavernini gave me a call last week and we had a nice long chat about the current course (a flat 2-mile loop, which sounds perfect to me) and his efforts to fix all of the ill will surrounding that 2008 race (which he has certainly done). In the end, I'm excited to head back to TX and put forth an honest effort to qualify for the US Team again. 150 miles or bust!!