Sorry for the sporadic posts for those of you who even bother to check back here. All has been good in Ann Arbor so far, though the weather has been somewhat unpredictable and it's been raining more frequently than I'd like. The past few weeks has been a whirlwind of trying out my initial class schedule, dropping classes and selecting new ones, wondering what's the maximum number of credits I should elect this term without completely sacrificing my sanity. Dropped Econ 401 for Public Policy which seems to be panning out quite nicely- it's far more interesting, and decided against continuing with Russian Politics for a Polsci course on modeling political processes. So all is well, at least until the exams come.

Training for Chicago has been pretty awesome too. The marathon's exactly four weeks away- it'll be time to start tapering maybe after next week, or something. I've been clocking mileage like nobody's business- sometimes when I think about it, I figure I'd think I was completely insane if I had ever conjured up the thought that I'd be doing somewhere in the range of 50-60 miles a week. It's pretty crazy. Especially when I look back on how in secondary school I used to think 2.4 km was so damn bloody far and thankfully we only had to put ourselves through that unnecessary torture once a year. In JC I slowly got weaned onto running, with canal routes and all for canoeing, but it still wasn't something I enjoyed, because I was terribly prone to stitches (much less now, thankfully, but it still happens at the worst times). And I remember how I used to think Leqi and Shine (I'm sorry, but I really did think you were nuts!) were absolutely bonkers for signing up for StanChart and doing various other mad things like going for a run along the MRT route. But anyway back to the point. Now I can't live without running.

Today's training run organized by the Tortoise and Hare Running Store was a great run for me. It was more of a recovery run because I did 15 miles yesterday and so I thought I'd take the 10 miles easy today. Managed to settle into a really comfortable cadence at around 8:45min/ mile and it felt awesome despite the blustery wind and slopes at the end that I picked up my pace and finished in an hour and 24 minutes. What was surprising was that I wasn't even winded at the end and I was even contemplating doing 14 miles because it felt like I still had plenty of energy to spare. But I decided against the additional four because of the 15 miles yesterday and I didn't want to risk anything so near the marathon. Anyway my mileage this week was pretty substantial- 20 miles at an easy 9:30 pace last Sunday, hilly route Monday of about 7 miles (quite unwise considering the 20 miles the day before), 2 6-mile tempo runs on Wednesday, one in the morning and another in the afternoon, another 2 6-milers on Thursday (I don't know what's with the 6 miles, but I like that route), 15 miles on Saturday and the 10 miles today. That's 66 miles in total, I've realized... Oh well.

Anyway Dean Karnazes has finished 8 of his 50 marathons, 42 more to go... Amazing. I'm looking forward to joining him at Chicago!