Here’s me putting on my game face before the race

Kris too

Here we are at the starting line:

Looking Forward And Looking Backward

Around mile 9 Around Mile 19

We finally finished

Carbed up at Noodles and Company and stuck to my personal training ritual of going by the DQ for an Artic Freeze.

near here

I found this:

4-Unpaved – it’s a jeep thing. So anyway after all that excitement, I decided to go for my run on the I & M Canal Trail again.

I hadn’t gone very far when I saw a turtle on the side of the trail.

He’s a little larger than last weeks turtle.

So I’m running down the trail right -

Then I see this stretched across the trail

Crikey! That’ll put a spring in your step if you’re not expecting it. (Terrible to hear about the crocodile hunter wasn’t it.)

As I was getting close to the half way point, I stopped on a bridge that goes over the canal at one of the locks that still has a lock house. There are several on the I & M and they were used to enable the barges to stairstep their way up or down as the water level rose and fell with the topography. Here are pictures looking west first, then east.

Did I ever mention that the I & M runs between the canal and the Illinois River? The Illinois River is large enough to accomodate barges and also has a large population of recreational boaters.

So here’s your faithful runner around mile 11 – I could still smile…

Here’s a couple more blue herrons just for fun:

Gotta figure out a way to hold the zoom steady, but this guy was in a tree around where a geocache was rumored to be. I still haven’t found the geocache after probably 5 searches.

On my way out of McKinnley I saw this beautiful fawn – I saw the mother too, but didn’t get the camera out quickly enough. Another shaky picture.

Anyway, it was a great run. I’ll be tapering between now and October 1st. My target in St. Paul will be survival, but it should be a fun event anyway.

One spot that was really beautiful a few weeks ago was a patch of lily pads literally covering the canal. This was taken today, and the flowers are gone, but it’s still kind of cool.
Here’s a picture of our faithful runner at around Mile 13.

There are a lot of blue herrons around.

One of the coolest things I saw today was a little turtle that look like tree bark. I’ll ask my homeschooled kids to find out what it is for me while they are one vacation this week. Here are a couple of pictures:

The cool thing is he looks just like tree bark and even has something that looks like moss (not Randy) growing on his back. He also has a long tail. I picked him up and said hello – he’s definitely a real turtle.

The first person who can tell me what this object is gets a free visit from my wife and 2 1/2 kids.

So at this point we still have 12 miles to go or so….

Here’s where they used to keep the mules that towed the barges up the canal.

As usual – here’s the google earth link to my run. Right click and download the file and open it with Google Earth.

Tried some new things today linking to Flickr for some of the photos instead of uploading them directly to the blog. We’ll see how that works.

Another interesting thing that happened today is that I ran in to one of my very good friends from church – Mike Morrisette on my run today. Mike spotted me on his bicycle all 20 miles of my 20 mile run preparing for the Chicago Lakeshore Marathon in 2002. Interesting that we ran into each other on the same run today.

Well that’s it for today. I’m going to hit the couch and what some football – Did I mention the rest of the family is vacationing in wonderful Starkville MS home of the MS State Bulldogs who didn’t do that great yesterday against a tough opponent.

Church was really good today. It was the first day for our new pastor. He did a good job and I got a lot of positive feedback.

Last week I had a really rough time with my 15 miler. I ended up walking as much as I ran for the last 3 miles. Today’s 16 miler and Thursday’s 9 miler were much easier. I did walk a little toward the end today, but not a lot. The differences in my prerun actions that I can remember were:

• I wore different shoes. I bought a pair of trail running shoes to protect the soles of my feet on some of the rougher terrain I run on. (I live in Illinois – I have to drive a long way to find a hill) They are surprisingly comfortable, but I don’t think they have as much conditioning as my much too old Mizuno Wave Riders. I put the wave riders on today. (I’m on the Dave Ramsey budget.)
• I ate more breakfast. I ate a peanut butter sandwich and some peach yogurt and drank some diet Dr. Pepper.
• I also put some honey in my water that I took on the run. I wear a Fuel Belt- Revenge the motion of running kept the honey well desolved. I was thinking I’d at least get some glycogen back in my muscles.

So for whatever reason, the run was much better. I did have one issue that is kind of interesting. For some reason I’ve developed a blister on the inside of my little toe on my right foot. At about mile 13 it started hurting really bad. I took my sock off (non-runners might want to tune out here) and saw some skin hanging off. After I removed it,it hurt like crazy and I didn’t think I could go on. I took both shoes off and walked for about 5 minutes and then said to myself “It’s going to take forever to get back” Sometimes ADD is a good thing. So what I did, since I didn’t have an Active
Strip (I work for 3M Company – they’re much better than bandaids) is I found a shiny leaf – non-poison ivyish – and wrapped it around my little toe to separate the toes and keep the flap of skin in place. Put my shoes and socks back on and away I went. It hurt for the first few steps and then I was ok.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal Trail (I & M Canal Trail) is a great trail to run on. Crushed limestone and 60 miles long not including all the other trails it connects into. Quite a few GeoCaches around it if you’re into that. I’ve linked geocaching with running many times. If you use Google Earth , here’s a kml file with my run along canal marked.Download JaysRun16Mile.kml

You can open it in Google Earth and see the run on the satellite map.

That’s it for now. I’ve got a busy rest of the weekend with the family and church.

1. I’m always trying to maintain fitness through distance running. I’m always
   looking for the next burst of motivation. Usually having a race scheduled does
   the trick. I’m now signed up for the 25th anniversary of the Twin Cities
   Marathon in Minnesota on October 1st. I have a good friend who lives there who
   ran the Chicago Marathon with me a couple of years ago. So the next step is
   setting up a training schedule.

2. The next thing I’m working on currently is improving my personal budgeting
   process. I discovered Dave Ramsey around the first of the year. http://www.daveramsey.com Now we’re living
   like no one else, so later we can live like no one else. Dave is all about
   changing behaviors. His theory is that personal finance is 20% head knowledge
   and 80% behavior. His program works on behavior and motivation. We’ve made so
   much progress that we’re teaching his Financial Peace University class at our
   church. We have almost 30 people signed up for the class. Credit cards reek!

3. The last thing on my top 3 list is GTD. It stands for Getting Things Done
   and is the title of a book by David Allen http://www.davidco.com. Again all about
   behavior in personal productivity. I’ve read the book three times and listened
   to it on tape twice. He teaches that you should capture all your committments
   and open loops in a trusted system rather than trying to keep them in your head.
   I’ll keep you posted as I continue my journey.