It is decidedly colder in the morning when I walk to work, this morning there was a feeling of tiredness, but I felt fine during the day.However when I got home I started to fall asleep at the computer, so I took a nap. My bus ticket for Manchester/ Penkridge arrived in the post, sent by my sister. This will get me home at Christmas time.

Well I'm back from Chicago and everything went well. I got to go to a birthday party on Friday and eat lots of great food. My race went well Saturday, it didn't rain although it was forecast. I felt quite strong and was ahead of my planned pace for the whole race, coming in with a time of 6:11:34, which is 21 minutes faster than my 50k in the spring. On Sunday I got to hang out at my friends restaurant and eat some good food. In the evening we went to a Greek restaurant for dinner, a nice treat. So quite a nice adventure all in all.

I'm just a few hours away from leaving for Chicago. When I ran this morning the temperature was close to what it will be for the race tomorrow, so I know that I will have to dress warmly. I am still a little sore from Wednesday but not much I can do about that, just have to run the race the best I can. Will write something when I get back.

Today at work we got one of our lumber deliveries from Canada. It takes about 4 hours to unload one board at a time with a crew of 8 guys. It is a real workout for the arms, legs and back and assuming I recover well, should help me in the race on Saturday. There were some showers early on which meant that I got a little wet, but in the end everything was fine.

There was a point this morning when I seemed to turn a corner, suddenly my old optimism returned. Instead of worrying about the future I started to live in the moment again. I am feeling a lot better within myself, part of it is that we are becoming quite busy at work and this allows me to just get on with it.

Although we have been running almost every day for the past 10 days, today was kind of our healing run. Utpal and I ran out to Flushing Meadow, about 9 miles ( 15 K ). It was a beautiful morning with sunshine and blue skies. It is just 6 days till my 50k race in Chicago and today I had the feeling that I am ready.

Yesterday I wasn't feeling so great after all the events of the past week. But I have 2 friends from Bosnia in town and it was suggested we go into the city which we did. It was a rainy day with showers on and off, but we actually had a fun time.This included going to the Museum of Modern Art ( MOMA ), which it turns out is free to enter on Fridays after 4 pm. Anyway it made me feel a whole lot better.

It is now 7 days since Sri Chinmoy's passing and preparations are now being made for the interment.I am so grateful to be here and be a part of such a unique experience. When I go running as I did this morning people in the community offer their condolence's and they politely ask what will happen now.

Today I went to work to try and bring some normalcy back. I think it helped a little, but there was no way the day felt normal.I am OK and life will go on having good friends around helps.

yesterday October 14 th I attended the memorial service for Sri Chinmoy, also in attendance were over 1000 of his students and dozens of dignitaries there to offer tributes. Many shared remembrances of times spent with him and the inspiration he offered. This inspiration will be carried in the hearts of each and every one of us. If you go to srichinmoycenter.org you can see many of the tributes and some news articles.

http://www.srichinmoycentre.org/

Yesterday I didn't post because I received some sad news in the morning.My Meditation teacher and Spiritual guide for the last 34 years Sri Chinmoy died.He was and is known for promoting Peace and World Harmony and will be sadly missed in this world. For the next 7 days his students will be honouring his life. He always inspired and encouraged me with my running and through my running I will continue to honour him.

When I got home from work this afternoon I listened to the new Radiohead album on NME radio, I enjoyed it very much. It is called In Rainbows and is only available by download at the moment. It provided a nice transition from work to play. The day started rainy and ended sunny.

It was supposed to be a wet rainy afternoon which it wasn't, but it was noticeably cooler after the hot humid days we have had lately. I decided to get Chinese food for dinner, there is a place 5 minutes walk from my house. On the way back it started to drizzle. Now as I write this post there is a steady rain falling outside my window. I have started to use my desktop computer a lot more than my laptop now, it is faster and the monitor has a bigger screen, but I have to switch a lot of my files over and I'm thinking of getting a new LCD monitor sometime before the end of the year, but we'll see.

The last 2 days , when I I have weighed myself after running I have been 145.5 lbs, which is about 20 lbs lighter than I was on June 1st of this year. I haven't been trying to lose more weight it just happened. After being sick the last 2 weeks my running feels normal again. I used my day off today to get a few things done, which included installing Joost Tv on my desktop computer. It is a new way of watching internet TV, from the creators of Skype, it seems quite good.

It is un-usually warm in New York at the moment so it was running in T shirt and shorts this morning. I feel so much better than last week, so we decided to run to Flushing Meadow and run over by the tennis center. Running nice and easy means that this takes us about 2 hours, which is a nice run. It was supposed to be raining but it was nice and sunny the whole time. I will see if a can do a bit more running this week to prepare for Chicago.

The England rugby team who were expected to lose their world cup 1/4 final to Australia let everybody down and won 12-10. What a great result! My morning began with me running an easy 5k and deciding not to run the 2 mile race again this week. I'm still a little creaky on my left side and don't want to risk anything for the 50k coming up. Other than that everything feels good, I thought I needed some more serious training for the 50k but my body decided otherwise.

I don't watch much TV these days, I watch some shows on the internet on my computer. There are a few new NBC shows that I have started watching. The one that I like the most at the moment is Life, a show about a detective who has just got back on the force after spending 12 years in prison, wrongfully accused of murder.Another one I like a lot is Heroes which is in it's second season here.

I finally got 2 good nights of sleep and my sciatica seems to be stabilizing.I think that I had to deal with all the other things first before I could get that under control. My running didn't seem to suffer much through all of this.

I may have mentioned that a friend of mine is in Paris at the moment working on a project. I am taking care of his Bonsai plants which include a couple of Jasmin and one of them has some very fragrant blooms at the moment.He also has a Pomegranate which is also showing a new blossom. My sciatica is a little better and I am hoping it will slowly improve as the week goes on.

During the evening last night I started to get some sciatic pain along with the tightness in my hamstrings, it wasn't too uncomfortable, but when I went to bed it really bothered me, I had trouble getting to sleep and it actually woke me up at around 2:30 in the morning.It happened that I don't have any painkillers at home. So when I got to work I took 2 Ibuprofen this did the trick and during the day I noticed that my hamstring tightness was also going away. So I am feeling a lot better now and have a bit of a spring in my step.

So it's the first day of October and I have decided to change my work schedule for a while. I am not working on Mondays at the moment. So this morning I could go for a run nice and early, in fact I went out just before 7 am. It was cool and sunny this morning and on the way back home I bumped into my friend Utpal so I turned around and went out with him for a few extra miles. I am still experiencing some tightness in my hamstrings and my left hip, but I think that will work itself out.