Marathon Update: Yes, it's still 26.2 miles of running.

The family and I drove to Nashville late last night, arriving around 2:00 in the morning.  I unloaded the car and promptly unpacked all my running stuff (clothes, GU, Beans, Water Bottles) and set everything out so I'd be ready come Saturday morning.  I had bought a couple of gallons of spring water at the Bean Pot in Crossville and so filled up all my water bottles with that and put them in the fridge.  One less thing to think about today.

Next, I was all set to log on with my wonderful Mac Book only to find out that there is no no longer Wi-Fi where we are staying!  However, there is a PC, which is fairly clunky to use and a little slow, but at least I have something I can use!  And as I was checking my email last night, I noticed that somehow my site isn't rendering properly...it's just text for now...so I'm not sure if that's an IE bug or if when I was changing a small thing the other night on my site, I "broke" something, and now it's looking all wonky...However...it looked fine the other night after I had made my changes, but of course I was using FireFox, and not IE...so who knows.  When I get done here, I'll be filing a help ticket to get to the bottom of it...(update:  ope..no need...when I published this post, the site popped up immedietely...I think the problem lies in this computer...I think the security settings in IE are messing with things...) Update:  Nope it was a technical problem with the blog company.

Today we're off to the Running Expo to pickup our packet and browse all the cool things they have to look at.  I think the Expo is in the same convention center where they are holding GMA Week, so who knows, I may run into some old friends while I'm down there.  Next up, I need to load our cell phone up with all the phone numbers of the folks I hope to see while we are in town...some of whom I'll be looking for on the race course on Saturday.  I'm hoping we can eat lunch at Bread N' Company while we are in town, I think there is a location real close to the start line, so I may try to grab some of their Cinnamon Toast sticks while I'm waiting form my corral to move forward to the start line.

At some point we'll hit the grocery store to purchase stuff to pack a lunch for my family who will be trying to see me at various points along the race course.

We also have family to see and meet up with...so we'll be doing some of that today, and I hope we are able to also see our list of friends too...and on top of all this, I need to make sure I'm getting as much rest...so I may find that I'm trying to do too much...One more thing I hope to do is to grab some of the boxes I have stored here, which include old demos, videos of my Sixpence and pre-Sixpence years, and basically just fun old stuff that I hope to scan or encode and toss up onto my Flickr and You Tube sites.

I'm excited for this...it's going to be fun, and challenging and I'm sure it'll be real hard towards the end.  I'm looking forward to running with Toby, and starting with Chris and hopefully seeing my friends along the race course, and getting plenty of time to zone out and relax and enjoy the peacefulness that comes with running for longer than an hour.  Someone was telling me yesterday that they don't like running as an exercise option because it was so BORING...well that's precisely what I like about it...because somewhere after about an hour of running, it ceases to be a labor and begins to feel more like meditation and calm relaxation.  Hard to believe huh?  It's a very peaceful sport and non-competitive/ non-confrontational, which I've found to be perfect for me at this point in my life.