Great Weather, Hard Run

To put this all in perspective right from the outset, my brother-in-law and coach Mark is running the Jacksonville marathon today, trying for a PR and a qualifying time for Boston. Go Mark! I can't wait to hear how he did, I'll check in in another hour or so with Jenny.

That said...today was to be ten loops around the lake. Well, we did the ten loops (14 km) but it didn't go as well as I had expected and at one point I wasn't even sure if I would be able to finish. We started out, well dressed for the cold (I wore long silk underwear under my running tights!), enjoying the sunny, crisp and bright weather. The first three loops went great, we were doing them in about 8 minutes. I kept waiting for loop three to feel hard, which in the past it always has, but it never did. It only felt hard at the end of loop four, actually, which I hope is a good sign!

But I got past the hard part, as always, just remembering that there is always that one loop that feels hard, where you don't think you can keep going, but you get past it, and you are fine.

Loops 5 and 6 were fine, great even, and we were still keeping our same bouncy pace. Then about halfway through loop 7 my right upper leg muscle started to hurt, like a sharp pain. I didn't think much of it at first, until it just kept getting worse. Why oh why??? Was it the cold weather? Lack of biking the last few weeks? Not enough water yesterday? Being lazy about stretching and yoga?

I realized it was going to be hard to finish three more loops with that pain in my leg. But I really did not want to go home without having done the distance I came to do. That happened to us last week, and the previous weeks I missed two long runs due to being sick. Mentally probably more than physically, today I really needed to achieve what I set out to do.

That's when I started thinking about Jenny and all those side stitches she has had to suffer through. If she can run with some pain, I can too, I thought. Plus, I know that I will not want some muscle pain to stop me finishing the half, so I figured this would be good practice in sucking up and just doing it. A small part of me was scared that if I kept running I might do some serious damage that would mess me up for the next few weeks, but honestly, it simply felt like a really tight, sore muscle, and I don't think that was a huge risk.

So I kept going. I took some longer walk breaks, then ran some more til it started hurting too much. Then I would stretch for a minute, take some more walking, and run a bit more. Stefaan was just ahead of me all the way (and he has his own pain issues), keeping me going. We finally finished the tenth loop! I was so relieved to have done it. It took us 100 minutes (the last three loops really slowed us down), which isn't even such a bad time, but the main thing is that we did it. Hallelujah! Now it's ibuprofen time!