Thursday 3 miles

8:14 pace with a HR max of 134.
 Anton is racing and his pacer is Dakota Jones... their combined age is 45.
 My top 3 picks are of course Anton with a new course record. Then Bob Sweeney (who is 43) and then Callahan. I will stand by my pick for Lindsay Lohan landing in the top 10 if she shows up sober. I had picked Abe Vigoda to place but I just found out that he died. I'll pick myself only to finish.

 I'm off to Leadville tomorrow. Almost no nervousness to speak of. Exactly like my first 50 mile race, I have no expectations really. Just get to Winfield in under 9:00 hopefully feeling great is the only goal I can realistically have. After that it's just myself that I am trying to compete against. It's exciting to step in to the path of a completely unfamiliar (and positive) challenge. We don't get to do that too often and certainly not one of this magnitude. This will be TWICE as far as I have ever run. There's not really a way to wrap my head around this... so there is no expectation.

 I liked this comment from n8
Lucho,
thought you might like this quote from Sebastian Junger's new book 'War'...

"I still remembered how to negotiate the long, horrible process of physical collapse. It starts with pain, of course, but the pain is at the edge of what I thought of as a deep, dark valley. At the bottom of the valley is true incapacitation, but it might take hours to get down there, working your way through strata of misery and dissociation until your muscles simply stop obeying and your mind can't even be trusted to give commands that make sense. The most valuable thing I knew from my running experience was that when you start hurting you're not even close to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don't panic at the first agonies there's much, much more of yourself to give."

best of luck man. right - left - repeat.