Hi from Japan

As most of you know, I am in Japan for a few weeks.  We are having a great time sight seeing.  I must say my running has fallen off a bit but, I did manage to still hit 78 miles last week even with traveling here and the busy days.  I have been running off of the base.  I just head on down the coast.  On my first 12 miler I ran into a lighthouse in a little village down the way, it is so quaint, love the little town and the lighthouse area.  There is some sort of shrine in a cave.  I took pictures for the blog this morning but I am having a tough time uploading them. 

Running here is super easy, there are bathrooms on almost every corner and tons of water fountains.  The only negative is how hot it is.  Even at 6am it is already near 90 and somewhere near 100% humidity.  It is hot hot hot.  Last I checked a Japanese woman was in 1st place at Badwater, no wonder, training in this heat would be perfect for that race.  I love how many people I see of all ages out running, it is completely impressive.  It feels just a tad hotter than TX to me here and you would never see anyone out running there in this heat. 

I am beginning to freak out a bit about my 100 miler coming up.  I know I have trained hard and well but what was I thinking over 17,000 ft of elevation gain and if you go up 17K you have to go back down so the race is going to hurt.  But, if I can't do this then I can't do any of my bucket list races so I better just get it over with.  My goal is just to finish, no time goals, no nothing, just get to the finish line in one piece everything else is gravy.  I just ordered gaiters because while I was perusing some race reports I realized the sand is pretty intense and the runners said you have to empty your shoes if you don't have on gaiters.  AHHHHHH!!!!!! Even that made me freak just a little.  I will have a strong crew: Mama Cathy, my cousin Todd and his wife Kathryn and then an awesome pacer named Jon.  With three crew persons I should have tons of support at each station so that will help with easing the worry of what to have on me.  I just need to stop freaking out and believe in myself and my training.  I can do this.  I can do anything I put my mind to.  I can do this.  I can do anything I put my mind to.  I can do this.....Relentless Forward Motion!!!!

I heard a podcast on sodium and I think on both of my previous hot races I have been way off on my sodium.  You need 600-1K mg of sodium an hour and at both races I didn't stick to that very well, at one race I had bad swelling in my extremities and we should have known something was up when we saw my feet but not even medical realized something was wrong.  I think I stopped taking sodium all together when the sun went down at that race and I surely wasn't taking it every hour.  At Heartland I started peeing like crazy in the middle of the night, my cells were getting rid of liquid to up the balance of the sodium, we should have realized there was no way for me to be peeing that much if everything was ok.  So I am going to work on that, work on changing out shoes and work on finding out a caffeine pill as opposed to coffee.  The stuff I learn on podcasts while I am training, LOVE IT!