Okay, so I'm pretty all-consumed with running the ultra next weekend. I'm a mere 6 days out, and I'm beginning to shart myself a little bit. Beinning last week, I started my "taper", which is to say, a serious reduction in mileage (2 weeks ago: 50 miles for the week, last week, 38, this week, 9 before the race). Yesterday, I began stuffing my face with starchy carbs and will continue this trend all week. Why? I'm glad you asked, and you, you are sorry that you did:

Filling your body full of carbs beginning a week or less out from a long race builds up the stores of glycogen in your system. After strenuous exercise of 60 minutes or more, peoples' glycogen stores normally get depleted, which causes your body to call on fat reserves for fuel. Problem being, fat doesn't provide as quick energy as glycogen - the result? Exhaustion, or, "hitting the wall".

When I woke up yesterday, around 8:30, I said to myself, "In one week, you'll have been running for an hour and a half already." We had breakfast, chatted, I slowly got my running gear together, drove to Griffith for my last 8 miler before the race, finished it, got home, showered, surfed the internet, looked at the clock...and it read 1:30. So I says to myself, I says, "You'll be finishing the race right about now."

Let the sharting commence!