Two weeks to go to Wilmington

In two weeks I'll be about 1.5 miles into the Delaware Marathon.  Logging onto the Marathon's web site this morning I see that they have successfully sold out the event--which is great because the cap on participants is 2,200, so the race will be nice and small.  For comparison, there were roughly 5,000 in my color's starting wave of the NYCM, and there were three colors and three waves.  Since I tend to do better in smaller races I'm really happy about this.

While checking my name on the confirmed runners list I noticed that this race is crazy popular with Fifty State runners.  I assume that's because Delaware was famously without a Marathon until 2004.  But there are some real running nuts here.  Scrolling down the list you see people running their 116th, 227th, and 449th Marathons.  There is even one die hard running his 619th Marathon.  I can't think of anything I plan on doing 619 times in the course of my life--much less anything as challenging as a Marathon.  Also, I would assume my legs would just fall off after Marathon number 500.  Kudos to them for being so dedicated to this sport...and for making my 50 state goal look so puny.

While all this is great, I spent my entire long run yesterday thinking that I couldn't believe I had a Marathon two weeks away.  This training cycle got off to such a bad start with our move, all the snow this winter, and that freaking eye injury, that I didn't begin training in earnest until March.  I'll be glad when this race is over and I can reset my training/running in more favorable conditions.

Speaking of post-Marathon, I've been playing around with borrowing the Summer of Speed idea from Nitmos.  I've only done one 5K and one 10K in my entire running career and it's starting to sound increasingly fun to have a series of smaller races from Memorial Day to Labor Day and then increase the mileage come September for an Oct/Nov race.  It's completely different from what I normally do and that sounds fantastic right about now.