The G Running Diary

Getting Ready: 8/18/03

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Well, it turns out that preparation for an 11-day run is big. Really big. Although we are never really far from home on the Bay Area Ridge Trail, we need to rely on other people for rides to and from our start and end points, people to bring us some supplies while we are running (especially water) and hopefully people to run with us, too. A couple sections of the route are a little unclear, but the majority is all detailed out.

Don and I are doing what I think of as a hard taper--that is, not much of anything at all. In the two weeks before a long event you cannot hope to catch up on your training. You are either ready or you are not. We ran two 50Ks on the previous weekends. I think that maintains the level of training we have. We are also still recovering from Badwater, which was a little less than four weeks ago. It seems a lot longer than that.

We start our run this Friday, August 22. I like that. Badwater started on July 22. There will be publicity for this "Run for the Ridge Trail." So far, I have done a phone interview with the Fairfield Daily Republic. The press release from the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council is divided up into county sections, so that the local papers can focus on their parts of the trail. It is an interesting perspective. Some counties, like San Mateo, have a lot of Ridge Trail completed, while Napa has long sections where it is difficult to see how the trail will ever go through. It would be great if the trail were all connected and you could just run straight through the whole thing, camping along the way. Someday that is the goal. For now, we will have some long segments of roads. Maybe that will be the toughest part.