Now What? 1 week to Tulsa

This is nerve wrecking now.  One more long-ish run tomorrow and couple more base runs and my taper and training is done before Tulsa on next Sunday.  I've been registered for this race since early summer, booked my hotel two months ago and I even have most of my race gear packed and ready to go.  Training has gone perfectly, all of the little dings and pings I had have gone away, even the pesky little hip flexor strain that was driving me nuts.  I feel better and healthier than I have ever in my life.  In my LIFE.  So what's left to do?  I think I already have a good race strategy and nutrition-while-racing strategy ready.  That forces me to look at little things that I shouldn't really worry about like what the weather will be like on race day and I even went as far as going through some of the course using Google Street View.  Bored with that, now.  I did find out that Tulsa is a beautiful city by the way.  What I should do is reflect back on this whole marathon training season, which for me started right after I paced the Big D Marathon in April.  Yeah, let's do that.  Thinking about all of the things that toughened me.  The hot hot summer runs where it's 97 degrees even at 9pm at night, the runs on grass and dirt hills at Norbuck Park, the humid trail runs at Northshore and Big Cedar, the dehydration incident- yes, the dehydration event, and the hilly routes thrown to us every other week in training at the DRC.  Most of all those few runs which I had to do on my own during the week but didn't feel like it, because my occupation had beaten me down all day long.  But I still did them.  Or getting up at 4am to get those runs in because I knew the wife would have me occupied with honey-do's after work.  I still got my ass out of bed.  Last but not least my running family whom I get so much encouragement and motivation from that can't even be measured.  I don't know what's going to happen next Sunday, but I can say I put (almost) everything I had into this training this season.  Of course there's that weeeee bit more that you wish you had done.  If I break my 4:13:06 P.R. that will be good.  If I break 4:00 I will be very happy.  If I hit my goal of 3:55 I will be ecstatic.  Any thing better than that I will be turning cartwheels at the finish line.  The only thing left to do is carry out my race strategy as well as I carried out my training. Unless something else strikes me to blog about next week, the next blog post will be the race report.  Stay tuned...   May the course be with me.  

-TNT-