Uhwarrie lead-in

A lead in to the Uhwarrie 40 miler in bullet form…

I love this race and this was the 4th year I’ve been lucky enough to get registered! It typically sells out in < 20 minutes…
Past reports:

January 19 Little River 10 miler – In the past this race has been 3 to 4 weeks out from Uhwarrie, so I’ve run it hard. But this year it was only two weeks out, so the plan was to run it “easy,” but that did not work out so well for me. I got caught up in the race atmosphere and still ran at a fairly hard effort!
January 20th – tweaked my right knee at the playground. Doing a 25-28″ box jump with no warm up the day after a hard 10 miler is not a good idea!
January 21st – ran 12.5 miles out at New Hope with David H. for my last long run. Barely felt the knee, so I thought that was a good sign.
January 22nd was feeling the knee pretty good and it was not a good feeling. 😦
January 23rd – easy 4 miler
The next few days the knee discomfort would come and go — one day being very significant and one day being 100% absent. Very odd.
Long weekend in the mountains with snow and ice so I opted not to run at all.
And then a somewhat unexpected trip to Europe came up…
Monday January 28th: red-eye to London
Tuesday January 29th: meetings in London, train to Paris
Wednesday January 30th: All day meeting in Paris with literally no time to do anything other than the meeting and dinner
Thursday January 31st: Morning meeting then head to the airport to fly home. First flight out to London was delayed, meaning I would miss my connection from there back to the US. Was told I was rebooked on Air France but I had to *run* to the other terminal, so back out security and passport control, run over, back through security and passport control, etc. Made the flight but was *stuck* in a middle seat in the back for 9+ hours! This flight was delayed so I missed my connections state side. Was put up in a hotel by Air France and given meal vouchers. I was booked on a 5:45 a.m. flight for IAD but there was no connection to RDU. So after going all the way back to the AF desk in the terminal, got them to put me on to a 9:45 a.m. direct flight to RDU.
Friday February 1st: Arrived home around 3 p.m. after running a couple of errands on the way home from RDU.
Saturday February 2nd: Race day: up at 2:30 as I couldn’t sleep. (Alarm had been set for 3:45). Went to Heather’s at 4:15 to head over to the race by 4:30…
Quite a two week lead-in, but my training had been pretty good — other than the unexpected “taper” and the R knee tweak.