Trouble

My incentive to do the rowing marathon has dwindled to this: I'm going to do it because I said I was going to do it.

The training, and the event itself, is (will be) really painful. During yesterday's planned 36K row I experienced, in addition to the excruciating low back and butt pain I've come to know and love, several severe episodes of left calf cramping. After 4 or 5 of these experiences in acute pain, I abandoned my row at 31K.

Over the past couple of weeks I've come to the realization that I'm really sick of the marathon training. As a result, my training partner and I have agreed to move up the marathon race date from mid-April to mid-March. This will leave my training a little less than ideal. That said, I now have completed 4 rows of 30 or more kilometers. I'm now counting on recovery as the key component to get me through this thing on March 15.

While I've been struggling with the long stuff, training partner John continues to thrive. He crushed the 36K piece yesterday in 3:54 per K pace. If he can hold that pace on race day (and I see no reason why he won't be able to), he'll have a marathon that'll place him 3rd in the world in his age group (40s) and 12th in the world in all ages groups. Impressive!