Running Chick

First things, first: I did not die running 20 miles. I had a few “Remind me why I’m doing this again?” moments during some tough middle miles, but overall, it wasn’t horrible.

The forecast called for highs in the mid-70s on Saturday, but not until the later afternoon, so I decided to sleep in for an extra 30 minutes and leave a little later.  I wasn’t going to take Zoe with me, but a friend of mine who runs up in that neck of the woods mentioned seeing bears in area where I was running, so I made arrangements with Josh (who was running a bunch of errands) to meet us after about 90 minutes and he’d take Zoe with him. 

My planned route was to head to Swedetown then take Woodland Road to Waasa Road, Waasa Road to M-203, then M-203 back to Hancock and finish somewhere around Porvoo Park.  Zoe and I took off from Laurium around 8:30 and noodled around up there for a few miles before hitting Swedetown. 

It was all pavement until Woodland Road, which turned to gravel.  It was nicely graded, so it was a fairly forgiving surface.  Added bonus, aside from a few small rollers, it’s mostly downhill.

We turned onto Waasa Road around mile 7 and after a few miles, we met up with Josh.  Up until this point, we were keeping a pretty steady pace of 10:50. It was a bit faster than I was intending, but we were trucking right along and I was feeling pretty good, so I decided to keep going with Zoe until we got to M-203 and then I’d hand her over to Josh.

We were at 11 miles when we made it to M-203. The downhill descent from Waasa Road is literally straight down.  Once Zoe spotted the truck & Josh and the bottom, she was all LETS GO! and took off.  Steep downhills tend to really aggravate my knees, so I try to take them slow & cautiously.  Zoe wasn’t having any of that, though, so I had to work hard to try to stay away from the loose gravel so I wouldn’t fall & have her drag me to the bottom. Crazy dog.  After a quick water bottle refill, Josh and Zoe headed to the hardware store, and I started on my way back to Hancock. 

The next five or six miles were pretty tough.  I hadn’t realized how warm it had gotten until I got out on the pavement and didn’t have any shade, so I was going through my water pretty fast.  The camber on the road started to bug the mostly-healed blister on my left foot so I was constantly trying to move my foot around in my shoe to find a comfortable spot.  I ran with traffic for a while to get away from the camber, but there was so much RV traffic that it made me uncomfortable, so it was back to the foot-hurting cambered side.  Then my stomach decided to act up, making me feel even worse.  I ended up stopping a couple of times in an attempt to regroup myself mentally.  Aside from my blister, my legs were feeling surprisingly good. It was just the rest of me that was feeling like crap.  Miles 15 & 16 were my worst & slowest, just under a 12:00 pace. Ugh. Also I ran out of water and was feeling really over-heated. Meh.

Finally, I hit Hancock Beach, which seemed like a fricking oasis at that point.

I made a quick stop to refill my bottles, took a pack of Sport Beans and tried to mentally steel myself for the slog up into Hancock.  Josh sent me a text message saying that he was waiting for me on the trail & Zoe wanted to finish the run with me. So, that gave me a little boost.  Also, so did the Sport Beans. I need to get more of those, for sure.  I felt pretty good making the climb, my legs were cooperating and so were my lungs.

I picked up Zoe and we finished up the last 1.75 miles. Aside from one stop to bark at some crows (which she hates, apparently), we kept up a pretty good pace and arrived at Porvoo Park. We actually ended up running past the park to the bridge and back in order to make our miles, but it didn’t bother me so much since I was feeling fairly good.

I did get cat-called by some loser sitting on the deck of the Beach Club.  I don’t know what his deal was, but I was not amused and just glared at him. I almost went over there to confront him, but Josh was one step ahead of me. He told Josh that he was hollering at the dog and not me. Uh huh. Jackass.

I ended up finishing in just over 11 minute miles, which I’m okay with.  I was hoping to keep it under 11 but those slow middle miles pretty much blew that plan. Oh well, at least it was way better then my last long run.

Also, I can’t even describe how unsettling it is to take off your shoe and see a bloody sock. I stared at it for a while. “Aren’t you going to take your sock off and look at that?” says Josh. I told him that I was scared to do it.

Eventually I did take my sock off and once I rinsed off my blood-covered toes, I found that tiny rock had made it’s way into my shoes and was digging into my toe. I have no idea when I picked it up because I never felt a thing.

We hung out at the park for a little bit while I ate a Larabar and had some water. We had errands to run so I changed in the pavilion's bathroom (gross. City of Hancock, please clean that place) and headed out. Zoe, who ended up with somewhere around 13 miles for the day, crashed hard.

I felt like doing that too, but after a quick lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon putting a new roof on the barn.  Climbing up & down the scaffold a million times in the heat with an angry blister the size of Texas on my foot and aching legs was not fun.  But, we got the first load of wood stacked so that’s good.

And with that, I am officially in taper mode.  This means that my mileage slowly decreases to basically nothing in the next three weeks which allows my body to recover & regroup from the last three months of punishment.  Next weekend, my long run is 12 miles. A few months ago, I would have considered that a really long run, but now it doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me. I can’t decide if that’s sad or not.

I ended up with 153 miles for August, only missing one run last week (got rained out). My average pace was was 10:55.  I am 3.5 miles short of the total number of miles I ran in 2012. I think I’ll probably beat it.