Just looking at the calendar this morning, getting a real feel for just how close the end of the month really is, and the start of this year’s Seventy48 race. It starts at 7pm (yes, that is correct), with just 5 hours left in the month of May, whiling on for 48 hours, from Tacoma to Port Townsend. That’s seventy statute miles, about 58NM (just sounds better that way, no?) Suffice to say that it’s a long way through fickle currents and the window really isn’t 48 hours, because it’s the current through the PT Canal that’s going to dictate the timing for everybody, from the Olympic ringers to the paddle-wheel, swamp-box crowd, and to me as well.

I haven’t been training all that diligently and for that I am truly sorry. I did the course a few weeks ago and finished at about 41.5 hours, so there’s that. Life, however, has been complicated lately, even more than usual, and I haven’t been hitting the gym or the paddle as hard as I probably should.

Still, what was that ol’ Yogi said?  Right. “90 percent of everything is mental; the other half is all in your head.” The ordeal is more mental than physical, and as physically demanding a task as this is, I am pretty sure that it will be the muscles above the neck that make the difference, when it’s all said and done. Which often turns out to be the case.