Ah, bank holidays. I totally recommend them. Happy Columbus Day!

By late last week, we already knew that Chicago was going to be warm, but who would have expected to hear the reports coming back from there? I'm very glad that my plans were changed. I don't know how I would have handled that heat. How exciting to have such close finishes at the end for both the men's and women's marathons? If you haven't seen them yet, check out the video here: http://cbs2chicago.com/

Sticking to the training plan, last week I did 4.5 miles Tuesday, 7x400s Wednesday, 4.5 miles Thurs, and 8 miles on Saturday. Although this training plan calls for 5-6 days of running a week, so far I've been able to stick with it. That'll change while I'm on vacation next week, but I hope to get a lot of hiking and some trail running in.

I bought my first pair of trail running shoes earlier this week. The store had a limited selection and the pair that felt best on my feet happened to be bright lime-green. I guess a nice thing about trail running is that no-one will be around to see the shoes... and if anything bad should happen to me out there on the trail, it'll be easier for the search party to spot me.

It was a great idea to sign up for a Thanksgiving Day race, since with all of the visiting family and friends over the past month or so and the upcoming vacation - it's hard to avoid eating like a cow.

The ING Georgia Marathon has announced on their site that the races will now start and finish at Centennial Park. There will also be a staggered start by pace this year, which is all good news. I'm expecting that race to be a lot better organized this time. The hilly route is daunting, but I am on a mission to do the full marathon.

Enough rambling for now and onto another cup of coffee. Once all the saps who have to work today get their butts off of the road, I'm going to venture out to enjoy my Columbus Day!

Runners Lounge

Social networking is all the buzz lately... I signed up on Linked In ages ago (maybe 2 years ago?) and it was kind of quiet until recently. Facebook is also heating up. Something has happened to make everyone want to connect virtually lately.

Now, there's a social network just for runners (as reported by Toronto Runner on the Running Blog Family). I'm really excited about this new Runners Lounge tool. I am happy that I can set up and manage my own profile, search for other runners in my area or with common interests. It's still in the early stages, but I'm sure it will soon take off like all of the other social networking sites are. What's even better about this one though is the focus of the community.

The other networking sites almost seem too wide-open - with no real community focus - so there's less motivation to be active. For example, I have a fair number of connections on Linked In, but I don't really know what I'll do with those connections yet. A lot of them are people I'm already connected to on a day to day basis via email, etc. Now, with the Runners Lounge, I know immediately that I can review what's happening in the running community and I know there will be people interested in my running stories in ways that my connections on the other sites won't be. Not to write a super-long essay here, but suffice it to say, I'm excited about Runners Lounge.