Five more sleeps until my first attempt at North America’s oldest road race, the Around the Bay race held in Hamilton, Ontario.  On the agenda for Sunday morning is 20km of fairly flat running, followed by 6 or 7km of hills and then a final run into what was Copps Coliseum (I have forgotten the new name) for a grande finale of a finish.  That unfortunately will not be the end of my day since I will then have the 5 or 6 hour drive back to Ottawa.  I have already warned my husband that when I get back home I may have to call him so he can come out and pry me out of the car.  I have never done a long run followed by and even longer car ride.  My gut feeling is that it won’t be pretty.

Today I finished my last double digit run before the race; a 10km route that at the beginning felt awful and by the end felt great.  What are the chances of being able to say the same thing as I cross the finish line on Sunday?  I have absolutely no idea what to expect – other than the fact I am guessing it is unlikely that I will feel better at the finish line than I did at the start.  I have bounced through so many approaches to this race that I can no longer keep track of all my ideas.  The plan for the most part has been to simply treat it as a training run and that would be the most sensible plan.  I started training for this race a month late and I really should have a couple of more long runs under my belt.  In fact, now that I think of it, I have only run 30k or more 3 times in my life, one of them during my first marathon.  The other two times had a good half hour break in the middle.  O.K, that sudden realization is not making me feel any more confident about this whole thing!

There is (perhaps unfortunately) a little voice inside my head that is saying why not just go for it, treat it as a race and not a training run and see what happens.  The voice of common sense then tells me what will most likely happen in that scenario – I will end up a stumbling, staggering, teary eyed walker. The famous ATB Grim Reaper will spot me from a mile off and then gleefully offer to carry me to the nearby cemetery.

So, a few days out and I don’t actually have a plan.  This may be a run based on feel and nothing more.  Ideally I would like to come in under 3:11, which was my 30k split time at the Toronto Marathon.  That said, the marathon had virtually no hills.  Right now I have this little fantasy going on in my head that when I hit the ATB hills I will discover that they really aren’t that bad and just what was all the fuss about anyways?  I can hope…