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.

I forgot half of my lunch at home and didn’t find anything of substance in the MUB, so I grabbed a bag of Chex Mix. Eat the entire thing, it was so good.  Headed out for my 8-miler later in the day and bonked. Geez, wonder why?

The first four miles on the Covered Drive were pretty good. Zoe and I managed to cruise along somewhere in the 9:30s or something like that. Once we hit the turn-around point, I started to poop out (see above).  My pace doesn’t really reflect it, but the only reason I was able to keep going was because Miss Zoe was pulling me along.  Every time I tried to slow down, she’d throw me a look over her shoulder as if to tell me that I’d better step up or step out. Ugh, damn dog.  It wasn’t one of my better runs (last week’s was way better), but it’s done, logged and marked off on the calendar. Onward!

I’ve been running out of fluids on my long runs so I upgraded to a four-bottle hydration belt.

This is the Nathan Trail Mix 4, which I picked up from Running Warehouse.  It took what seemed like forever to me to make enough adjustments so that it wouldn’t bounce around, but when I finally found the magic combination, the thing didn’t budge, even with four full bottles. The pouch is just the right size for my phone and the various other things I schlep along.  I found the bottles easy to remove/insert from the holsters and I like the caps way better than those on my Trail Mix, especially since they didn’t leak!  In the amazon.com reviews, some people mentioned that their bottles randomly fell out of the holsters.  The fit seemed pretty tight so my bottles weren’t budging.  I did a lot of bending over to tend to Zoe, and the bottles never budged, either. Who knows, maybe the holsters will loosen up in the coming months.

For today’s test run, I carried two bottles for me and two for Zoe.  She likes for me to squirt the water into her mouth, the caps made this pretty easy to manage.  Two thumbs up from me, two paws up from Zoe.

Five miles on the schedule tonight. I had planned on doing them pretty easy. My legs were still feeling a bit tight after Saturday’s long run and sore from something. Maybe yoga on Sunday?  Seems weird, but okay.  I also had a headache, and generally felt meh.

Not able to come up with a really viable excuse to bail on my run, Josh and Zoe and I headed out the door.  The first two miles were on the slower side due to lots of cars being on the road. Zoe isn’t doing so well with cars. She’s skittish and flighty, so instead of having her dart into the road, we stop and wait until the car passes.

Just before the end of the second mile, I caught the edge of a pothole and rolled my ankle.  It hurt like a sonofabitch. I heard a snap when it happened and for a minute I was freaked that I broke it, but apparently it was just some random snapping noise.  We stopped for a few minutes so I could walk it off and continued on.

And the somehow we just kept on going faster for each mile (10:35, 9:41, 8:47).  Zoe, who mostly trots along beside us no matter what speed we go, actually broke into a run on the last mile.  I had been leading the pack for the majority of the run and wouldn’t you know it the last .25 mile is uphill and I couldn’t hold the pace anymore. Josh (who is a big cardio machine since RAGBRAI) went on ahead and finished and I came along shortly after.

It was a pretty decent run for someone who had originally planned on going out easy.