Sundown Marathon – most unorthodox training cycle ever and why I CAN

The Sundown Marathon starts Saturday night at 11:30 pm. Today I started carbo loading. It’s weird because Andrea and I have lessened our starchy carb intake recently so eating rice noodles for breakfast and rice for lunch has me feeling heavy. Our change in eating (which you can read about here ->link) makes me feel much better but I know I need the fuel for the marathon and really don’t know any other way to get it other than eat potatoes and rice. I plan to skip the bread and pasta though.

My training for this marathon has included a 30k race called The Maze. The weeks following The Maze I mostly took off from running while we worked on our house in Texas. Then I came back to Singapore and ran an 18 mile, a 20 mile and a 19 mile long run followed by a back off week of 12 and then I climbed a mountain with Jakeb. For the last two weeks I have been recovering from the climb and have done very little running. Jakeb and I ran MacRitchie on Saturday for eight miles. I had no fuel in my body and the run was horrible. Three days from now Jakeb and I will run a marathon for which I don’t have high expectations as far as my finishing time goes.

As I read that last paragraph I am struck by the reason I CAN run marathons (and climb mountains). One reason is because God has given me a healthy body and I work hard not to take that fact for granted. But another major reason is that I have a wife in Andrea who supports this craziness. Andrea from the beginning almost exactly 20 years ago has not just endured my running but has encouraged it. We go to bed early so I can get up before work and run. She hangs out without me for hours on Saturday morning so I can run long runs. Just now we changed our plans to eat Peaking Duck because I need a more starch heavy meal the night before the marathon. And she agreed. And we both really like Peking Duck. I love Andrea for a bunch of reasons and one of them is that she is a big part of nurturing my love of adventure and the everyday journey that running is. She has even run and walked races of her own. And I believe as a result we’ve passed on that love of adventure to our son.