I Made It

I made it to Bloomington, Indiana after almost ten total hours of driving today. I needed to go down to Iowa for work this morning and then left from there. It looked like the GPS was going to match my printed directions pretty well so I trusted it. Not always a good idea. I went through so many small towns and took so many turns when I should have just stayed on one road for the first hour. After that it was all good. It was about 80 degrees outside so I tried to take advantage of not being in a hurry and made a lot of stretch stops. I also listened to about half of the audio version of Tony Dungy's book - Uncommon. Very inspirational stuff. I must say that I got a little emotional when he was talking about the 400 meter runner in the Olympics who pulled his hamstring coming around the last turn. His dad came from out of the stands to help him finish the race. That's my all-time most memorable Olympic moment.

My legs were getting pretty stiff from all that time in the car so I really had to be deliberate about getting out every once in a while and stretching. My back had been bothering me for the past couple of weeks. I saw my chiropracter and massage therapist yesterday to try to get ready. I've also spent a lot of time with my rumble roller lately. Overall, now that I'm here I feel pretty good. I felt like I should have taken advantage of the high temperatures lately by doing some training on the track, but I didn't want to take a chance on doing anything that would make me too sore, especially with my lower back issues lately.

Tomorrow's the big day for me. I run the 400 meters in the later afternoon. It is set up as a timed final for my age group and we currently have enough guys where there would be two heats. It's nice to not have to run a preliminary round, but I'm not sure how they will set up the heats. We've often had guys who sign up and then don't show so it's possible that we could have one heat.

So my preparation for today was just to try to stay loose. No running and no workout. I'll do a little foam rolling on the rumble roller tonight and then again tomorrow. My diet for today was a couple of grilled chicken wraps for lunch, an apple and Gatorade for snack, and a turkey sub with a lot of vegetables for supper. I'll see what the hotel has for breakfast tomorrow. I have some Shakeology and a shaker cup and I will have that sometime in the morning.