Running Chick

Greetings from Vidalia, GA, where it’s hot and humid. 

Our first night on the road, we stayed in a Fairfield Inn that in Marion, IL was so new it still had the wrapping paper on it.

It’s been raining so much in Southern Illinois that they are currently under flood warnings.

Some of these cows decided to take advantage of the flooding and go for a little swim.

Lots of boring stuff later, we were going through the mountains close to Chattanooga, TN.

Yikes.

We smelled this guy before we saw him. His brakes were smoking bad.

I was secretly hoping he’d use one of the runaway truck ramps and provide me with an awesome photo opportunity, but alas he just rode the brakes all the way down the hill. Boo.

Here’s the Southern Belle dining boat cruising along Tennessee River.

On the other side of Chattanooga, this giant thing was causing a major traffic snarl.

It’s a partial dump truck box being towed by a semi. Pilot cars were leading and following.

It took up close to two lanes, it was enormous.

We started seeing carnage from the storms that swept through Alabama and Tennessee.

We cruised through downtown Atlanta with no trouble and were doing a lot of gloating when we came over a hill and ran into the end of this mess.

It looked a lot worse than it was (Google Maps only gave it a yellow on the traffic jam scale), and we were delayed by maybe 15 minutes. I was able to snap a picture of a plane taking off from the Atlanta airport, but I can’t remember if it was before or after the traffic jam.

We started seeing signs of damage from the storm that swept through last week. Downed interstate signs, guardrails ripped up and trees sheared off. Scary stuff.

We stopped a few times for shopping and dining and rolled into town around 10pm, road weary and glad to not be moving.

Greetings from Southern Illinois, where it’s raining like a mofo.  I guess it’s better than the 80 mph wind that we had for the first ten hours of the drive. 

I held my camera in my lap for the majority of the trip waiting to snap a picture of something exciting but I got nothing. A few windmills and some other boring things, but that’s about it. As soon as I packed my camera away as dusk was falling, we came around a corner just North of Effingham, IL and discovered a giant semi flipped over in the grassy median of the expressway. Figures!

We pulled into Marion, IL after twelve hours on the road, checked into our hotel and decided to try and find a little bar to have a drink or two. Guess what? Marion, IL stops serving after 9pm on Sundays. Seriously. Bah.

We have another nine hours on the schedule tomorrow before we arrive at our final destination in Vidalia, GA. We go through Nashville and Atlanta, so I’m hoping this leg of the trip will provide me with more picture taking opportunities.

No running this week, but I did do trainer rides of 30 minutes, 40 minutes and 1 hour and 45 minutes.  This time, my long ride was made possible by the royal wedding on DVR (loved the dress), last week’s episode of “Justified” and the first hour or so of the “Hurt Locker”. I was trying to make it to an even two hours, but I just couldn’t.

I had another session with the massage therapist on Wednesday.  He found a bunch of trigger points and knots deep in my calf and down by my ankle that he attempted to work out, while I tried not to cry. Some of them were pretty painful. He also gave me LED light therapy, which is supposed to help speed up the recovery process. Josh thinks it’s a hoax, but I don’t know. I figure if it works, great, and if not, then it’s not like I’m out anything. My leg was pretty sore the next day from all the attention it got, but it did seem to be a lot looser. Two days after the session, I was walking up & down stairs without pain and I’m thinking I’ll probably go for a short run or two this week and see how things turn out.

Sitting in a car doing nothing for 12 hours straight is hard, time to hit the sack!

OK, I lied. It’s week 9, but I didn’t know that when I wrote the title. Then I decided that I should stop being lazy and figure it out, so there you go, week 9.

The schedule for week 9 called for five miles on Tuesday, four on Thursday and eleven on Saturday. I was able to do the five (9:57 pace) on Tuesday and that’s it.  My right lower leg is giving me some serious trouble. I’ve got pain in the back, from the heel to the calf and then on the inside, right in the soleus region.  I’ve been stretching, icing, ibuprofening, rolling, massaging, strengthening, trigger pointing, taping, compression sleeving and just about anything else that I read about on the Source of All Self-Diagnosis (aka the internet), but I’m not having much luck. I went back to my PT guy on Thursday for some myofascial release and he found that my right hip was a bit tipped forward (toward the ground) resulting in my right leg being a tad longer than my left. He surmised that because of this, my right leg was taking a considerable beating when I was running and that was probably causing the majority of my troubles.  He worked for quite a while on my hip, quads and calves and everything felt pretty loose and happy when I left. He did warn me that I might feel sore the next day, and I didn’t really believe him (myofascial release therapy isn’t exactly like deep tissue massage or any massage, for that matter), but the next day I certainly was sore. Doh.  I have a bunch of stretches to add to my exiting 40 minute stretch routine and a re-evaluation next Wednesday. Hopefully my hip will stay where it’s supposed to be and everything else will settle back down.

Anyway, it was kind of a bad training week for me. I ran on Tuesday, skipped my XT on Wednesday, then skipped my run/XT on Thursday for PT and dinner with friends. I was really itching to go running on Saturday, but common sense prevailed and I decided to ride the trainer instead. An ninety minutes and four episodes of “Roseanne” later (episodes are around 23 minutes, no commercials on Netflix!), I’d ridden 35 miles.  Here’s me pretending to look all serious trainer ridery while watching Nancy (Sandra Bernhardt) tell Arnie (Tom Arnold) that she likes the ladies. Please excuse my messy house and no, I don’t have aerobars, think I should get some? I think I’d probably kill myself if I tried to use them on the road, but I think I decided they’re a must for long trainer rides.

We spent the rest of the weekend finally getting paint on the walls of the spare bedroom that was gutted & dry walled this fall.  I’m turning it into a workout room so I chose a cheery yellow color because I thought it would put me in a good mood when I was sweating away.  Trouble is, it was like three months ago when I selected the color and I must have been in a really good mood because it’s not just yellow, it’s YELLOW. I sincerely hope it grows on me.  Finally, we watched “The King’s Speech” on Amazon on Demand last night. After all the hype and critical acclaim this movie got, I was expecting it to be really good.  I thought the story was interesting, especially so because it was true, and the acting was really good, but it just didn’t hold my interest and I found it to be quite the snooze. Sorry movie fans, this one gets a thumbs down from me.

Next week, I’m supposed to do 3, 4, and 12 mile runs. I’ll attempt the 3 miler and see how it goes from there.