[That's Fit blogger Larissa Brown chronicles her journey to health and fitness through this regular weekly feature, Road To Fitville. Her first milestone was North America's largest two-day relay race on August 25-26. Here is her report from the road.]


Friday Morning: I furiously pack a few last items and jump in the car with four cases of water, a gigantic mound of healthy food, and three running outfits in Ziploc bags. I'm bubbling over with excitement. There are 12 women on my team, and I don't really know anyone in my van. I stop for my last cup of coffee for two days then meet my vanmates. As we pack our stuff, we get a proud and frantic call from our first six runners. They are 40 minutes ahead of our estimated schedule! We load up our various power ades and jump in.

Later Friday: After all the excitement, we sit for a while at a big parking lot in Sandy, Oregon , waiting for our first set of runners to approach the exchange. There are more than 12,000 runners in this race, and the volume of people is beginning to show. Vans are decorated wildly, with everything from college alumni teams to the fiersome Michael Bolton Running Team (How Can We Be Runners If We Can't Be Friends?). Our team is all moms, and we have time to decorate our van with all our children's names while we wait.

Friday 6:30 pm: I'm the last runner on the team, and I start my leg on a mean, nasty uphill in the hot hot sun. I struggle across a long (did-I-mention-hot) urban road that passes my teammate Sarah's house. I feel so loaded down that I consider dumping my water and MP3 player on her porch, but reason with myself that I'll want my stuff later. I dial up an inspirational message from my husband on the MP3 and hurl myself onward. Turning onto

Hawthorne Blvd

in Portland , I run past a group of heavy smokers waiting in line for a concert and gag. Then pass all kinds of bars with people drinking beer and eating pizza. Gag, gag, gag.

It was 9 p.m., I was a few hours from my second about six-mile leg of the Hood-to-Coast relay, and I was going on seven hours of sleep in the past 48 hours. I thought I was going to throw up. I was headachey and nauseous and poopy and oh, how was I ever going to make it through? My first leg, at 2:30 in the afternoon, had gone very well despite the heat, semi trucks blasting past me as I ran on the shoulder of I-84, and long hill at the end; I'd run a good time, equivalent to my best 10-K time in years, although a bit slower than my goal pace of eight-minute miles. More importantly, I'd racked up eight "roadkills" (passed runners), mostly men. Awesome.

And I was there mentally; I'd done yoga and positive thinking training with my team. I was looking at vertical lines (which makes you perform better), I was repeating my mantra, "light on your feet, light on your feet!" -- even sending my lightweight brainwaves to the runners I passed on the way up the hill.

But now, 12 hours and 80-some miles into the race, I felt awful. I couldn't imagine 12 more miles. I couldn't imagine one more mile. I took ibuprofen, I drank water, I ate two cold potatoes and some mandarin oranges.

Cut to 10:30 p.m. Magically, I've made a total mental transformation. I think it was the cheerleading: a teammate and fellow former cheerleader and I started chanting, "T... T R U... T R U C K, keep on truckin' all the way!" for Olivia. I'm walking to the exchange zone with my teammates and saying, "I'm in the best shape of my life! I feel so incredible," and they're agreeing with me, not sure if I'm truly believing this or just working on the positive-speak. When the runner before me comes in I grab the wristband happily and take off, prompting a stander-by to exclaim, "if you keep up this pace, you'll win the thing!"

Here at That's Fit, we don't just talk about our subject matter. While we're not posting, most of us are out there "living our content," as we like to say. If you have been following Larissa Brown's Road to Fitville posts or Sarah Gilbert's recent posts, you might recall that today and tomorrow, they're participating in Portland's Hood To Coast relay, North America's largest relay race.

Along with 10 other women on their team, Larissa and Sarah are running a total of 197 miles from the top of Oregon's majestic Mt. Hood down to the beautiful Pacific Ocean in Seaside, Oregon. They're going to try to check in with us via cell phone to pass along updates (our best attempt at live-blogging the event), but in case of technical difficulties Sarah and Larissa will be back to blog about their adventures and other That's Fit topics early next week.

Let's wish them luck! They've trained hard to make this goal a reality.

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I'm training with Larissa for the 197-mile Hood-to-Coast relay; our team starts running at 8:45 a.m. on Friday. Yes! This Friday. I'm terrified and exhilirated at once. And I have a question for you:

When do you start carbo-loading? And what should I be eating, and drinking, 30-48 hours before I start my 18.3 miles of torture?

I've been terrible, thus far, flitting from a late-night snack of marshmallow creme and peanut butter to a lunch of fried chicken and mashed potatoes to a healthful dinner of pasta, tomato sauce, cheese and spinach. Now chocolate chip cookies are baking in the oven (for the team, naturally) and I'm thinking, ye gods, this has got to be the wrong stuff.

Cool Running advises that I should stay away from beans, bran cereal, lettuce and broccoli; BBC Sport says I should be loading up on carbohydrates today (and yesterday, too, thank goodness for pasta with pesto last night). With two days to go before a major race, what would you be eating?

[That's Fit blogger Larissa Brown chronicles her journey to health and fitness through this regular weekly feature, Road To Fitville. Her first milestone is a local, two-day relay race on August 25-26.]

Stringy pink cotton candy clouds floated above as I ran into the sweetest cool air and loveliest sunset last night. My feet -- in their pretty new expensive Asics -- were bouncing off the sidewalks with no hint of heaviness or sluggishness. As I ran, I composed haikus and designed knitting patterns. My mind wandered happily, and even on the uphills I'd look up to find myself suddenly five blocks closer to home.

My sunset run was in stark contrast to the other run I did yesterday. That's right, I completed two runs in one day. You see, this weekend is my big relay race, and I needed to practice running more than once in a day with about nine hours of recovery time.

The morning run was a hot slog. I was nervous because I was running with one of my teammates whom I'd just met. She was faster than me, but I knew the route, so I was working hard to keep up with her and yelling directions like "Go around that reservoir and then meet me back here!" At one point she took the jogger to try it out and I watched my little baby roll off over the horizon with a near stranger. A very pleasant stranger, my teammate, but still it was weird. I was highly motivated to keep up with them and I didn't enjoy the process.

So when night approached I headed out with some trepidation. How could the second run of the day -- this one after nine hours of "recovery" that included hosting 12 people for brunch and reading about 40 board books over and over and over with my son -- be any better? I'm so glad I tried, because it was better. So much better. As I sprinted the last 60 seconds up to my house, I felt alive, validated, light, happily hungry and seriously proud. And I even went to bed with loose muscles, a condition virtually unknown to me.

I learned that I can do this race on Friday. And I was reminded that for every hard run it's always worth trying, trying again. Because a bad run is a special kind of hell on earth. But a good run is a special kind of heaven.

Here are my August stats:

• August 21
• Today's weight: 158.5 lbs.
• Pounds lost since June: 7.5
• Minutes it took to run my fastest mile this week: 10:42
• Minutes shaved off my mile since June: 1:43

[That's Fit blogger Larissa Brown chronicles her journey to health and fitness through this regular weekly feature, Road To Fitville. Her first milestone is a local, two-day relay race on August 25-26.]

Anne Lamott wrote in Operating Instructions about her body after her son was born: "When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy." For a year after my own son was born, in May 2005, I kept repeating my own addendum. An affirmation. "Someday," I said, "my stomach will get up and join the rest of my body."

Problem was, my stomach wasn't going to get up and join me without my help.

According to Professor Judy Maloni of Case Western Reserve University, recovering from both childbirth and bed rest is more complicated than recovering from childbirth alone, and she suggests quite reasonably asking for help from a physical therapist to create a recovery program. That's something I never thought of, and it wasn't offered to me by my health care providers. I muddled through, astonished to find I needed both hands to help me do my first post-partum sit-up.

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