Starting point : Dinwoodie, Indiana 7:50 am

Ending point: Wabash, Indiana, 7:05 pm

Total mileage: 107.9

Total useful mileage: 103.4

The challenge today was to figure out how to make decent progress and find a place to sleep. Turns out, it couldn’t be done. There were wonderful camping options just 39 miles from my starting point, and a wonderful Warm Showers option 50 miles from my starting point, but both would have had me calling it a day before 2 (CST-it flickered back and forth between Central and Eastern for much of the afternoon.)

I could stay on the Adventure Cycling route and either be done at 2 or stealth camp or I could rely on Apple to guide me to a town with a Warm Showers option or a Hampton Inn if I didn’t hear from Warm Showers. WS came through, so I dug in and made it to Wabash, 107 miles from my start. I made it just before sunset to have enough light to pitch my tent.

The riding is beautiful. It’s like being in the Quetico. I saw maybe 5 people, maybe 20 cars all day. I did have to pull off the narrow farm roads twice for farm implements the size of pretty big houses.

Not sure what tomorrow holds. Probably lots of time on the bike.

Start: Fulton Market District, Chicago, 10 am

In front of Millennium park bean. I took my gloves off to take the photo, and then 3 miles later I realized I left them there.

Finish: Dinwiddie, Indiana, 5:15 pm

Total mileage: 62.2

Total useful mileage: 53

Today went pretty much like I imagined it would. The day was perfect, and the 10 miles along the Lakeshore path leaving Chicago were a dream. From a bit south of the Museum of Science and Industry the route heads away from the lake through increasingly impoverished neighborhoods to the outskirts of Gary. It is Chicago for like 2 hours! I was primarily on rails to trails paths after leaving the lake with a few meanderings through neighborhoods. All was perfect and surprisingly bucolic for the area between south Chicago and Gary. But then I encountered the first of 3 big detours. An extremely long, like miles, train was parked on the track blocking the path. I waited for 20 minutes. Two people on bikes come through from the other side. They carried their bikes between coal cars.

I decided not to do that.

I headed up train for the 2 miles and was able to go under snd over tracks. I crossed over the tracks just as the long train that I’d gone out of my way to avoid went by.

Detours 2 and 3 added about 3 miles around construction in Indiana.

Todays lesson is that I need to account for detours. Who knew?

After 17 weeks and 792 miles of running, thousands of squats, lunges, deadlifts and 8 rounds of dry needling, the moment to lace up my new Vaporfly 3s came early on the morning of October 8. The weather was perfect and my recently strained glute was feeling better than it had since tweaking on September 22. All systems go!

Like all the Abbott World Marathon majors, this event is huge. It’s hard to describe the experience of being crushed among 47,000 nervous runners from more than 100 counties. It is both a lonely and a collective experience. You run for yourself, on your own and yet we are all feeling many of the same feelings—excitement, dread, concern about the length of the portapotty lines. I made some tactical errors in signing up for a starting corral. Because I was competing in the Wanda Abbott Age Group World Championships, I was assigned to the first corral with the fastest of the fastest. Staying there would have been a disaster. Most of my WAGC peers opted for corral E. I should have done that. I was worried about starting out too fast, but by the time I gave this my attention a month ago, corrals F and G were full. So I was in H.

Bad plan.

It took 2 miles on course to get to the 4 hour pacers—my plan was to run at 4 hour pace for the first few miles to settle in. What I learned is that the crowds at this race never really thin out. It’s chaos the whole time. Pedestrians cross the course, runners just stop in their tracks or cut across to high five someone. One needs to be continuously vigilant.

But it was amazing. On a day that saw a new men’s world record and the second fastest time by a woman, I was able to run my fastest time since my devastating hamstring injury in 2015 and to improve on the 3:58:28 that got me in the world championships. I clocked in at 3:52:32 and that included having to stop 4 times to uncramp my toes from my Vaporflys. I also managed to negative split with the second half 2.5 minutes faster than the first. Needless to say, I’m in post marathon bliss today. And not very sore—thanks, Chicago!!!

I’ve been training all summer, buying all kinds of specialized gear, talking to people, downloading apps, you name it. This week has been all about figuring out this blog(!) and learning that, once again, cycling technology is in a completely different place now than it was when I bought my what-I-still-think-of-as-new Lemond in 2000. Today’s lightning bolt was all about tubeless tires.

And I got some expert AI help with this blog and am getting there. I think there may have been some humans behind the scenes as well, but, really, do we need to know?

I’m getting ready to run my 16th marathon, then bike 1,200 miles to my 17th a few weeks later. I don’t know what the big deal is. I guess I’ll find out?

The blog is up! The bike is getting tubeless tires! (Who knew!) Carb loading is getting started in earnest.