Consistent, see?

Race season is about to start, and I'm not feeling at all prepared.

Except to see stuff like this golden evening sunshine.
I'm ALWAYS ready for that.

While this weekend's race is only 25k, I have a lot of longer events looming on the ever-nearing horizon...and my longest run since the Stride Inside 6-hour back on January 5th is only about 23.5km / 3-ish hours.

I've been more active than fungus, but only barely.

Ok, perhaps I'm not giving myself quite the credit I deserve with that, though. Last Saturday's 23.5km / 3 hour romp around Huron Natural Area did happen after already having run 10-ish kilometers down to the Cambridge Farmers' Market in the morning.

Fortunately after some of the flooding had subsided.

So it was actually more like 4hrs / 34.75km for the day. I only ran less than 7km early the next afternoon.

Down the Royal Rec Trail in spectacular sunshine

That was, however, followed up with another 6km on the Linear Trail at sunset.

The Confluence is such a stunning sight in the evening.

So really, at more than 46km in 2 days, I suppose some work is getting done. I've even managed to climb my way back onto the Slowtwitch 7-day leaderboard since we got home from Mexico and my weekly mileage has come back up to around 75k.

Ok, maybe a titch more than.

Still, I continue to freak out a little, knowing you can't expect legs that have only done ~3hrs at a time to respond well when asked to run for more than 15 hours. Given my still-not-100% ankle, I worry about my durability over the course of a long race, especially knowing how miserable I was during my last lap at the Tally in the Valley 12-hour last July. 

When I didn't even have the sight of pretty flowers along the path to cheer me..

While stressing about all of this over the last couple of days, some things have happened that (slightly) assuage my concern. First of all, I had a couple of articles come across my path that both argued against mileage for mileage's sake in their own ways: one regarding long runs, the other weekly total distance.

There are many paths to greatness, and since I'm only seeking "passable" I might be ok..

I also thought a bit, then had a look through my training logs - the last time I took more than 1 day off of running in a 7-day period or had back-to-back days without runs was all the way back on December 6th and 7th. That's almost 5 months of running at least 6 days per week. 

The longest view I have only shows back to December 17th, just after the start of the 100 in 100

While lots of those have just been half-hour-ish runs on my lunch break at work, it's all added up to more than 1,000km from January 1st to April 30th (1,015.4km, to be dorky about it), and ~1,194km since those 2 days off in early December. Considering I only netted 1,688km for the whole of 2018, I figure I must not be too far off track.

Small runs can add up to big things...I hope..

As a matter of fact, my total distance for the first 4 months of 2019 is only about 111km shy of my January 1st to April 30th total for 2017...and I managed to do ok at a 100k race a month later, so perhaps it's time to just relax a little.

..and maybe even smell the flowers along the way.

Hope to see some of you out at Rugged Raccoon this weekend - I've got almost no sleep this week (like even less than usual) and my total "taper" for the race will consist of not running to the market on Saturday morning, so look for me at the back!