Oops, I did it again...

...and I'm not talking about the Britney song. Although now I'm humming it as I write. Aaagh! Make it stop!


Let's talk about races, shall we? 'Cause I just signed up for another one.

Race #1 is this Saturday. It's a 5-miler, which is perfect for me at this stage of my training. My long run is currently 6 miles, but it goes up to 8 next Saturday. (The same week that my Thursday 4-miler turns into a Thursday 6-miler. Whee!) I won't actually be racing it. If anything, it will be a testament to my ability to hold back when everything around me is screaming "Go faster!!" It will just be a training run for me.

The weather is currently looking pretty lousy for the race. The forecast calls for temps in the mid 40's, which are ideal for racing, but there's also a 70% chance of rain. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that a) the forecasters are full of malarkey and it will just be overcast (which would really be perfect) or b) that there's a break in the rain just long enough to get the race in or c) that the "rain" is just light sprinkles. With my luck, however, we will probably get d), which is "Frog-strangling misery for the first 3 miles and squishy shoes and blisters for miles 4 and 5." If nothing else, it will teach me how to race in the rain, if, heaven forfend, it rains all over the Big Race itself. Practice makes perfect, yadda yadda yadda. So far I think I have run exactly twice in the rain, and both times it was summer, so it was warm enough that it didn't bother me too much.

Race #2 is a 10-miler at the end of April. I did not know it existed two hours ago and now I am signed up for it, thanks to my alert TNTmate posting on Facebook about it! (Thanks, Elizabeth--I think.) I am actually scheduled to run 12 miles the day of the race, so I'll have to work in a mile before and a mile after or something. I find it hilarious that the race isn't long enough! One nice perk is that I will get to run part of the half-marathon course during this race. And 10 miles is far enough that it should be a pretty good preview of the Big Race in terms of where I need to stop and take breaks, how tired I'll be, how heat/wind/weather might affect me, what might hurt toward the end, etc.

Any minute now I'm expecting the police to come busting in asking where Amanda is and what I've done with her. If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be wondering how to make a 10-mile race longer, I'd have asked you what you were smoking.