Running Chick

Here’s a quick catch-up on the week of August 12-18.

Thursday, 5 @ 11:51

My legs were pretty dead from the previous night’s 8-miler so Zoe and I ran an easy 5 miler.  She still gets freaked out by cars, so this was a good opportunity to work with her on being calm.  I loaded my hydration belt up with doggie treats and off we went.  We encountered a bunch of homeward bound 5:00 traffic on Cole’s Creek Road. For the first mile or so, I stopped her and let her look at the cars as they went by, constantly praising & giving her treats.  Then we switched to walking as cars went past, and finally a slow jog.  It seemed to be working pretty well, actually, until we got to the Canal Road and then it was cars, cars, cars and Zoe had a minor freak out. Fortunately we were close to the end, but holy cow the speeding traffic on that road.

Saturday, none

I was supposed to run 19 miles in the morning, but Josh was racing in the Great Deer Chase and had to be in Calumet for 9:30.  There was no way I was getting in 19 miles before 9:30 so I decided to push my run back one day.  No big whoop.  Zoe and I shuffled around Calumet for several hours waiting for him to finish. We got to see all the racers take off, then a parade!  I had no idea Heritage Days were going on up there.  Tons of people, tons of dogs, bikes, cars, you name it.  I was a bit concerned that Zoe was going to freak out over the parade, but she was not bothered by anything.

Then we headed up to Copper Harbor for Art in the Park.  More shuffling around. Beers, not so great food. However, we discovered the Brickside Brewery is dog friendly! So awesome. Zoe’s first bar, awwww.

Sunday, 19 @ 11:24

Well, this was an absolute shitstorm of bad.  The dog had a shitstorm (literally) on the living room floor just as I was leaving which put me in a cranky mood. Seriously, only 20 minutes earlier she had been outside. Cripes.  Then, two miles from my front door, my stomach decides to revolt. Two miles!  I should have just turned around right there, but but I slogged on.  It got hot and then I started hitting the hills.  I use mapmyrun.com to plot out my courses and the elevation profile for the route I took through South Range & Chassell looked relatively flat to slightly downhill.  I found out this was a big, fat lie.  It was hot, my quads were killing me from all the hills, I had a pounding headache and my stomach was pretty unhappy.  Man, those miles between 8 and 14 were awful.  Then, I was in a never-ending debate with myself over whether to take fuel or not. The bad thing was that I needed the fuel to keep going so it was pretty much a no win situation. So yeah, I’ll spare you the details.

Josh joined me on his bike around mile 14 and I thought that having the company would take my mind off how awful I felt, but nope. I didn’t have the energy, or mental capacity for that matter, to engage in small talk so it was a silent and painful run back to the truck.  Just to add some insult to injury, I had to run past the truck and then turn around and run back to make my miles. Nothing like running past your final destination point, ugh. 

This was without a doubt my worst run of the season (so far, knock on wood). It was demoralizing and discouraging. I didn’t even bother looking at my statistics until a few days later because I didn’t really want to know how bad it was.  Now, a week removed, I know exactly what went wrong. All the wandering around on Saturday, the beer, the crap food, the shitty night’s sleep, they all caught up with me.  Dumb thing is, I knew I was was taking a big chance doing all that stuff, but I did it anyway. I’m smart like that.  Anyway, bad runs are part of the process. I’ve been training for long enough to know this, you just have to learn to live with it (you don’t have to like it) and let it go. Moving on.

My weekly total for the week of the 12th was 37 miles (holy shit!) at 11:00.