Friday, March 16, 2012

Cleared to run and travel planning

With tomorrow's race looming, I decided to go back to the doctor's today for a follow up appointment. Even though he's my primary care physician, today was actually the first time I met him because I've seen the nurse practitioner at past visits. He was nice, but talked very fast. After prescribing an antibiotic for me, he was almost out the door before I had a chance to get to the real reason I was there... to see if it was okay to run. If left to my own devices, I would have gone ahead with the race tomorrow. But since I do make stupid decisions sometimes in the name of running, I figured I'd better get a professional opinion. I was fully prepared to skip the race if the doctor said no.

Luckily for me he said that as long as I have the energy, it's okay to start running and working out again and it won't adversely affect how quickly I get better. I also asked whether in general it would be better to stick to the treadmill versus running outdoors in the cold when sick. I think he might also be a runner or some type of endurance athlete because when I said I'm training for a 30k, he replied that the treadmill is too boring for that kind of distance without even asking how far 30k is.

So with a race in the morning to get ready for, I better try to rush through the rest of this post...

This is an obvious exaggeration, but sometimes I feel like I spend almost as much time planning for a race as I do actually training. This is mainly because I do quite a few destination races. Even when it's a day trip like when I drove from Baltimore up to Wilmington, Delaware last year for the Caesar Rodney Half Marathon, it still involves some research finding the best local restaurants. For the most part I don't mind the planning because I want to get the best deals and make the most out of every travel experience. But sometimes I think we'd be better off without so much information right at our fingertips. For example the first time I drove across the country, it was a true road trip using physical maps to plan the route and just driving until we were tired and then finding the next highway exit with a hotel. Last summer, some of that spontaneity was lost because I was constantly checking TripAdvisor for reviews, comparing prices, and calculating which city was the best to stop in for the night based on the driving time from Google Maps.

Anyway, with my downtime this week I started finalizing travel plans for May which is good because it's approaching so quickly. Even with the switch over to daylight saving time and more hours of sunshine, it doesn't feel like spring yet because it's so darn cold outside that I'm still wearing my wool pea coat.

The first thing I did was get a hotel reserved for Rock 'n' Roll Portland. I've been debating this for awhile and I finally decided that it wasn't worth paying an extra $100 or so just for the convenience of staying near the race start. Although of course as I type this I'm starting to change my mind again. Do I really want to deal with driving and parking on race morning? Maybe I'll do some more number crunching this weekend.

I also booked my hotel and airfare out to Orlando for the Expedition Everest Challenge. For me it's really a no-brainer to stay on property at WDW. Flights were a bit more challenging because of the distance now that I'm in Washington, but I ended up with flight times that I'm happy with. I didn't set out to do this deliberately, but both flights connect through Denver which means that during the layover I can stop by the Paradise Bakery equivalent and get a yummy turkey cranberry sandwich and some chocolate chip cookies. I'm almost as excited about that as I am about going to WDW. I'll probably do a more in depth post later about WDW trip planning in conjunction with a race.

The last thing I did was register for the Tower of Terror 10 Miler in October (wanted to be sure to get in before the price increase), so that's yet another trip to plan but at least it's still six months away. I've been tracking my "cost of running" this year and the registration fees are really adding up! I'm going to have to do another post about that later too.

If you live in or have visited Portland, please leave some tips on good restaurants and other things to check out while I'm there. Thanks!

1 comment:

  1. Ooo have you considered the Wine & Dine?? I'm still debating between that one and Tower of Terror. I love Disney races :O)

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