Hawaii Bound

Jill and I leave early tomorrow for Hawaii. I've never been to Hawaii before so I really don't know exactly what to expect. It's been awhile since I've gone somewhere so new to me as Hawaii will be. It should be exciting, not just because it'll be so warm and sunny but also because it'll be something completely new.

We don't have much of a plan. We're taking stuff with us to be able to camp (which we probably will most of the time). We're flying into Honolulu tomorrow, I'm running The HURT 100 on Saturday, then we're flying down to "The Big Island" on Sunday, and back to Alaska next Thursday. I've got car rentals lined up in Honolulu and Kona but that's pretty much the extent of our plans. Other than that we'll just see where we end up and what we end up doing.

I really don't even have much of a plan for the race. I haven't focused much on the course and race details and I haven't decided yet just how much of an effort I'm planning to put into it. I'll just kind of let all that fall into place over the next several days. The one thing I am not willing to do is anything that is going to be a significant setback for my Iditarod Invitational training. If things feel good and smooth on Saturday I'm going to go with it and "run to win" if at all possible, but if things aren't going smooth for whatever reason I'm not (hopefully) going to push beyond that threshold that I would normally be willing to push beyond in a "focus" race. That is the threshold beyond which my body will be severely broken down and need significant recovery from. Sometimes I'm able to run a 100% effort and never go beyond this threshold (Wasatch) and other times there seems to be no way to avoid it (Miwok). I'm in great shape right now so I really hope that I'm able to stay below this threshold while still putting in a near 100% effort. I just wish it wasn't going to be about 70 degrees warmer than it's been here for most of the past month. I better be sure to be drinking lots of Nuun.