For whom the bell tolls....

Is that a ringing in my ears or the sound of a fat bird in the corner clearing her throat? Either way, it’s time!


The final throes of our training schedule passed in a painful blur with Liz completing her 18 miler last weekend and me finishing my longest run the weekend before but then spent a few days lugging a rucksack up and down a few hills in the Italian Dolomites which turned out to be great strength and endurance training. Plus though i'd mention it as it's allows me to upload a pic that's actually relevant.


In between then and now I’ve been doing a few cycle rides and a couple of 4 mile jaunts which have seemed like a warm up session compared to the mileage we had been putting in.
Injury wise both of us seem in pretty good nick with no real issues to speak of. My calf’s have been OK since I finished the long runs, my physio gave me some ultra sound and massaging which helped massively and the comparative rest has been the single biggest contributor.
Liz’s shin splints have completely gone and she’s been going great guns, both of us have been stretching quite a lot with the main beneficiary being our gas supplier as most of the stretching sessions have taken place in piping hot baths!


So we fly out at ridiculous o’clock tomorrow but that’s nothing compared to the lunacy of a race start time of 7.30am which effectively means eating our bowlfuls of porridge (we’re taking it with us) at about 5.30am – eeugh!


On the plus side we are staying in Chicago with our good friends Sharon and Dan who recently brought young Miles into this world and we’re very much looking forward to meeting them all.


Our original goal was to run a sub 4 hour time, however, this got revised to just being happy to complete the course once our injuries robbed us both of approximately 8 weeks of training. The good news is that having slogged through the long runs we’re feeling more positive about hitting a decent time and are planning to latch onto one of the specially provided pace runners in the hope they can drag us round as close to the 4 hour mark as possible.


A massive thank you to all who have sponsored us via our Just Giving page http://www.justgiving.com/lizandmatt this is reason we’ve being doing all of this and with times being as difficult as they are we really do appreciate every single penny.