The Knoxville Half-Marathon Countdown

Hail my running brothers and sisters!  I have 3 more days until the  Covenant Health Knoxville Half-Marathon.  The Good:  Temperatures in the mid 60's.  Ends on the 50 yard line of Neyland Stadium (home of my beloved Tennessee Vols).  Course goes through much of my old haunts from college.  The Bad:  70% chance of rain.  Way too many hills to get to the stadium.  Much of the course was still under road construction last I saw.

I'm looking forward to returning to Knoxville to run their half.  I love running races in places where I've lived.  Not only does it make me feel connected to the city/race, but I often see parts of the city that I hadn't seen before.  Still this will be one of my harder races of the year, because of the difficulty of the course.  Considering that I'm running a full marathon a month later, I'm going into this race as a training run.  Anything under 8:30/mile would be like playing with house money.  It would be nice to bust out a 7:50/mile, but I don't want to hurt myself or backslide on my speed training.  Of course, I say that I'll treat it as a training run, but I'm just as likely to break my fool neck going all out.  There's something about knowing that my time will be posted for everyone to see that always pushes me to try a little harder than I should.  I'm not sure what race support/spectator attendance will be like, but I imagine with the rain prediction, most students/spectators will be staying in bed (Of course, if UT makes it to the Elite 8, the city just may stay drunk all weekend).  It would be nice if Derek Dooley was on the 50 with a couple of cheerleaders though.  ;p

I'm hoping the expo will be strong.  I'm planning on heading over to Knoxville early in the morning and spending all day (or as long as I can stand it) at the expo.  I'm really looking forward to hearing Mark Remy speak.  He's a writer for Runner's World and author of the The Runner's Rule Book, and he's really funny.  Of course, I'll be buying my obligatory expo shirt/jacket/swag.  I'm hoping to find a cool running jacket or vest with the marathon logo on it.  Half my wardrobe is now running apparel, and a quarter of it, I got from races and expos.  That isn't too much, is it?

No hard numbers today.  C'mon...what do you expect?!?  It's a taper week for goodness sake.  I did manage to squeeze in 7 minutes of conditioning.  Geek Violence:  Ninja Assassin came out on DVD last week.  If you love ninja movies (and let's face it, who doesn't), you must own this movie.  The gore is over the top, but the action is INTENSE!!!  This one might even be worth owning on Blu-ray.  Okay, I'm off to bed and dreams of training run-PR's.   Later kids!