run this amazing day

It's been nearly two years since I stomped a marathon in Boulder. I haven't set foot on the vast majority of the run course since.  Maybe (probably) I'm overly superstitious, but it's been easy to avoid.  There are squillions of places to run in Colorado where I don't have to face my ghosts.  Because that's truly how it has felt since then.  Haunted, by grief and failure both. The month after Santa Rosa brought another one of those little stormy seasons in training, the kind that only lasts a few weeks but when you're in it, feels eternal.  The crick in my neck flared out angrily in every direction until I ended up parked in bed with my laptop, working between muscle relaxers and people diagnosing me with too much stress.  I am fortunate to not have had too many of these train-screeching-to-a-halt injuries in the last six years but this one came all too soon on the heels of a rough 2016.  It took a while to sort out the root cause, then a few more days

As far as race weeks go, this one wasn't great. My neck/upper back freaked out.  It started as, weird, maybe I slept  wrong  and pretty rapidly degenerated into, that's cool I don't need to look left or right or up or down ever again.   I had some life stress going on so it wasn't exactly a mystery as to why it popped up then.  I wasn't even sure if I was going to be able to go race, but by the time Thursday rolled around, it had calmed down enough that I packed up the bike and got on the plane. I landed in San Jose to spend the weekend with my remember-that-one-time-when-you-rode-your-bike-straight-over-me good friend Ashley (and her four ounces of new kitten).  I built the bike, got it checked over by an awesome friend-of-a-friend who fixed all the little things that I may or may not have noticed (tires on backwards?) & we drove up to Sonoma.   The logistics Friday were relatively easy.  I woke up and went for a short run; it felt as awful as I would