L.A. in March should actually be pretty amenable; the average high in March is 70, though with some occasional weirdness.  S.F.’s not a bad idea though; I should file that away for future thought.  What I really want to run someday, though, is the Big Sur Marathon, which is supposed to be unbelievably gorgeous.

Thanks for the link to the running log; I’ve been using an old-fashioned notebook log for a while, which is nice for the flipping-back-through, but the kinds of calculations that the Excel log can provide are really appealing.

Though I don’t know what you mean by obsessive-compulsive.

;)

Unfortunately, we had a relatively warm day. I imagine the L.A. marathon sort of guarantees that kind of weather. If you feel like heading up the coast for more amenable race-day temperatures, I hear good things about the S.F. marathon. Imagine training in Los Angeles and racing in San Francisco!

Apologies for the unsolicited advice, but the Excel running log template available at http://www.davidhays.net/running/runlog/runlog.html is great for the obsessive-compulsive runner, who needs to know how many miles are on those shoes, what her average pace for a year’s worth of long runs is, and what the pace-per-mile caculation would be for fifteen miles run in two hours and three minutes.

Good luck with the running!

Interestingly, on the un- and mis-diagnosed disease front, the stories that have over the years sounded to me most like my own experience have been the stories of folks who’ve been diagnosed with MS, only to have their symptoms clear up when they have their silver-amalgam fillings removed.  The argument is that the mercury in silver-amalgam fillings can leach into the bloodstream, and that, in some particularly sensitive folks, it will trigger auto-immune responses.  As it happens, while I was in the midst of being treated for the mystery disease, my dentist discovered that the chemistry of my mouth had caused all of my silver-amalgam fillings to begin breaking down, and so he took them all out and replaced them with composite fillings.  At the exact same time, my rheumatologist finally began to pull out the pharmaceutical big guns, and prescribed me anti-malarial drugs.  I’ll never know which of the two did it, but within a couple of months, my symptoms started rapidly receding.

So go figure.  The marathon was about five years after I’d gone into remission, and was a great declaration, mostly to myself, that I was better than I’d been before I got sick.  Now, watching forty begin to loom on the horizon, I’m feeling the need for another such declaration of the “getting better all the time” variety.  We’ll see how it goes…

The marathon sounds exhilirating. FYI, Dave and Natalie over at Wordherders recently blogged about their first marathon experience.