An update...

It's been two weeks since I posted because, well, I haven't been traveling recently. Here's why...

Last weekend was a quiet, relaxing change. I ran my last long run before the Chicago marathon, by doing two loops around Hyde Park, Green Park, and St. James Park. Doing this run the morning after going out for drinks with work colleagues, running on my own, not in a race atmosphere, I maintained a 3:06 marathon pace and still felt pretty good afterward. After this, the goal of coming in at a sub-3:10 time in Chicago seems slightly less impossible!

The rest of the weekend was somewhat quiet... my flatmate and I went out to dinner at a French restaurant in Angel on Saturday night and actually got to talk and be social for the first time really since I moved in. Although we see each other pretty much daily, we're on somewhat different schedules and don't always end up talking that much -- not out of trying to avoid each other, but just out of timing. This was our first time we'd had a relatively relaxed meal together in the two months I've lived here and it was great to actually start to get to know her after being here for a while already!

This week, I came down with a cold. I generally try to insist that I'm not really sick, take some Sudafed, and get on with life. However, with the marathon coming up, I tried to take it a bit more seriously so it'd be gone before the race. Thursday felt substantially better than the previous two days, so I thougth this might have been my shortest-lived cold ever. Friday morning, though, I woke up feverish and achy. I had to go into work because it was my first day at a new client with a new team, and I couldn't start off by just not being there. By 2:00, though, I was mentally useless and had to head home. I slept for three hours or so, woke up long enough to watch Fargo and have a bowl of soup, and then slept another 11 hours last night. I'm feeling substantially better today, but still am going to force myself to have another quiet weekend, to make sure I'm over this before the race.

So, next weekend, I'm on a Friday morning flight from Heathrow to Chicago, planning to do some shopping on Friday afternoon to pick up some stuff that is substantially cheaper in the States (running shoes, dress shirts, and the like), doing dinner with a coworker on Friday night, prerace stuff with Stu, Andrew, and the Hoboken running club on Saturday, the race Sunday morning, and then likely touristy stuff around Chicago on Monday before taking an overnight flight from O'Hare to Heathrow Monday night and going straight into the office to start another new project on Tuesday morning. We'll see how this actually works out...