Wow.

What more can you say. You'd have to be living in a cave to not know that Michael Phelps won his 8th gold medal of these games, a record. The 7th was pretty incredible ... won by .01 seconds. And Dara Torres lost the gold by .01 seconds. What a heartbreak to see Deana Kastor have to pull out with a foot injury at about 3 miles in the women's marathon. A great run by the winnerRomania's Constantina Tomescu Dita.

I'm fairly certain (pending no conflicts on his calendar) that RTC member Ed Creagan, M.D. will be the guest speaker at the RTC annual banquet January 10, 2009. The talk will tentatively be Managing Stress in the 21st Century, or something close to that. Thank you, Ed, for being willing to speak.

We have a last minute substitution on our Ragnar team. Kit Hawkins is injured and will not be able to run with us. :-( I am happy to report that Lionel Cheng will be running on our team! I'm sure this event will provide my fellow blogger and I much bloggin material. As Paul Christian is running with us, perhaps our merry band of runners will also get some Post-Bulletin coverage ... ???!!!

Speaking of Ragnar Relay, Andy Shulha's team is still in need of a female runner. If you are interested, see the forum on the RTC website for contact info. Let's help him complete his team!

Congratulations to Pete Gilman and Mary Chestolowski for wins at the Lace Up for Leaders 5K yesterday, and to Chris Koch (2nd) for running a 3-second P.R. We happened upon the race during the morning's marathon training run. And congratulations to Larry Pederson on the birth of a new granddaughter. Family and friends went out during the run looking for him and found him near Assissi Heights.

Yesterday's run wasn't a stellar one for me, but I knew that it would be kind of tough so I wasn't at all surprised. Wasn't well rested, watered or fed going into the run and kind of bonked about mile 14 where there was about a 5-6 mile gap between water stops. I'd debated bringing my own bottle, but decided not to. Wrong decision.

As I had to get to church by about 10:00 for a wedding, I ran to the RAC from home, joined up with the group there and ran the County 22/Fox Valley Drive hills for the second time that morning. :) We'd run this same route on the same weekend last year ... the weekend of August 18/19, 2007 and the terrible floods. It rained cats and dogs during that run, and was one of the best runs I'd ever had. :) Ran it with Laura Lenz. Anyway, the miles out on Mayowood trail left me feeling a bit woozy. When I got to Laura and Abby's water stop at the gardens, I sure had a hard time getting going again. I'm sure I was there more than 5 minutes. Then met up with the 5K runners and stopped to take photos. Then stopped again for a while at Soldier's Field before finally heading out for a cool down mile with Chris Koch (his cool down) on my way home. Ended up with 20.44 miles--a bit more than I'd planned. I remember the course being at least 19 miles last year as well. All's well that ends well as they say.



It easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

Enjoy the beautiful day we've been given!!