Trying to get some perspective

Training Plan - Rest Actual - Rest With increased mileage I don't feel as restless on my rest days as I used to. In fact I have come to quite enjoy getting home before dark and having time to prepare a proper dinner on a Monday evening. Well, this time next week I will be blogging from the Gold Coast, am I excited, hell yeah, still have to get through another 4 days of work though. I am so looking forward to seeing my brother and sister and their partners and of course Charlie the world's cutest chocolate lab. So today I am trying to focus and keep it all in perspective. That is, it my first race at this distance and while I want to do the best I can I have to keep reminding myself that I am a total novice and to take this as a benchmark race. Phew, does not stop me being nervous as hell though :-) I keep having awful thoughts of things that could go wrong. Worst of all I am worried about letting myself down, I guess that is why it took me so long to commit to a goal time. Now that I am in the final weeks I should credit where I got my training plan from. Being a total newb and having no idea where to start I grabbed a training plan from www.runnersworld.com (the US site). You enter your recent race time for a chosen distance, enter the distance you are training for, your lead time & whether or not you want a maintenence, moderate, hard or very hard schedule. Then hey presto you have a plan, the only downside was converting all the miles to kms. I chose the moderate level and I'll say here that I have not been totally slavish to it as it asked for some damn high mileage for a "moderate" plan. Including a couple of races & a Rogaine kept the mileage down a few weeks in there. Someone wise pointed out to me yesterday that at this stage I am not going to get any fitter so should be careful not to over do it. Now I did put up my plan for the week yesterday but I will revise. Firstly, it scheduled a 26km long run, well, I obvioulsy am not going to do that. I will still do the 14.5 Km tomorrow, mostly at goal race pace, but will follow with a 11 km on Weds, 13km on Thurs, 10 km on Fri, 8 Km on Sat and 20km on Sun for a 76 km week. The training plan actually had a whopping 92 Kms scheduled, even I know that is waaaaaay too much 2 weeks out. My taper week will be 4 runs only of 8km, 8km, 10km and 8km with rest days on Monday and Saturday. There are no interval sessions planned in the last 2 weeks. So steady as she goes and just trying to keep healthy.