This week has been a blur of battling sickness and work, work, work. I'm trying to get ahead so I can happily enjoy having post-marathon Monday off to recuperate and it's made for a pretty hectic week.

Despite the busy-ness of work, I squeezed in a really nice run the other day. After reading basically every article about the marathon taper I could find on the internet (I like to do my research!) I felt like I had a pretty good plan in place, a few easy runs and then coasting until the big day. Many of the articles (sorry, no links because they are bookmarked on my other computer, but I know they were from Runner's World) highlighted the fact that even though you are decreasing mileage you don't need to decrease intensity (you also shouldn't INCREASE it though, very important). As is typical for me during a training period, I've been feeling a little over running. I'm tired of watching my heart rate, of doing painfully slow long runs, of HAVING to run. So I decided to take a break from all that. I ditched the heart rate monitor, set my Garmin for 30 minutes and just RAN. It felt great! I remembered what it was to get my legs moving again, to feel free and happy on the roads. It was comforting to see that I hadn't lost all my speed and that it could feel good again. I still have a shake out run or two left in me- 20 minutes today and maybe tomorrow, nothing hard- but I consider that to be my last "real" training run and it was the perfect one to end on.

Last night I was craving comfort food to help shake this sickness so I settled on a chili recipe that I stumbled across not too long ago. I can't remember what blogger had linked to this but as soon as I saw the name I knew I had to make it (and that my sister would want to as well): Peanut Butter Vegetarian Chili! I followed the recipe exactly and it was amazing! You can't really taste the peanut butter but it does make the chili a bit more substantial- which can be hard with a vegetarian chili. In the name of easing into carb loading I served mine in a sourdough bread bowl with a dollop of 0% plain Chobani.

It was exactly what I was craving and we have tons of leftovers.

We enjoyed our chili while watching half of the Eddie Izzard Marathon Man docu-series. Have you ever checked that out? It's totally insane- with zero running background he set out to run 43 marathons in 51 days. And while he wasn't setting any speed records it was still incredibly motivational. Really highlights the importance of mental toughness. It was super motivational.

Big plans for tonight: playlist making (I want to have at least 5 hours of music ready), house cleaning (visitors arrive tomorrow!) and another good night of sleep (probably my last chance for that).