Remember last Saturday, when I was so chirpy about running eight miles? Well. Today I ran nine miles, and I am not at all chirpy about it. I am, like, the Antichirp about this run. The root of the problem, I think, is that I'm 20 days into the Whole 30, and it's not super compatible with distance running. Too many salads, not enough fruit. I haven't been trying to avoid carbohydrates, but that's what seems to happen on a grain-free sugar-free diet. Next week I've got to be more careful about glycogen -- I was feeling crummy from the first mile.
Our route today had only one water fountain. We passed it twice, when we were 2.75 miles and 8 miles into the run. Since I knew this was coming I was carrying a water bottle, and (this sounds whiny, I know) I'm not used to that. It was interfering with my arm swing, she said whinily, and I needed my arms today especially. I was so exasperated that I thought about stashing it in my cleavage, or leaving it by the side of the trail and coming back to retrieve it in my car afterward. The running store that sponsors this training program sent me a $15 coupon yesterday, and I am going to use it to buy a fuel belt tomorrow.
There is zero chance that I would have run nine miles today without the training program. I thought about bailing early on, when we ran a loop that took us back toward the parking lot. I thought about bailing a little further along, when the rain started pelting down. Things were better for a while, thanks to a long gentle downhill, but then we got to the turnaround point. Math is usually my friend on a run; I'm constantly calculating percentages and occasionally cheering myself up with prime factorizations. But when I said to myself at 5.2 miles, "It's okay! It's just 38 more tenths of a mile!" -- I was utterly uncomforted. The fact that I was 59% of the way through the run at 5.31 miles was soul-crushing, not encouraging. (More whining! Sorry!) "All righty," I said to myself at 6.3 miles, "now you only have to do 3/7 of what you've already done!"
Are you ready to smack that math cheerleader yet? Because I was totally ready to smack her.
I usually run with the second of our four groups, and as we ran back toward the starting point I kept watching for people from the slowest group. Finally I asked the mentor who was running with me: where'd they go? (You guys, she was SO patient and encouraging. I was ready to sit down on the trail and call my husband to come and get me in the car, but I knew I couldn't do that when she'd been hanging back with me.) She told me that the women in that group had agreed to run together earlier in the day instead of running with everybody at 7:30. Which meant I was going to be the last participant to finish the run today-- the very last one.
It turns out that even the last person to finish a training run can still say she finished the #@$#!% run. It turns out that I can run (or sort-of-run) 9 miles, even when 6 of them are mostly misery-- even when rain and sweat drenched me so thoroughly that after I got home and stood still in the kitchen I was quickly in a puddle of my own making. It also turns out that I'm going to bed at about 8:15, so: THE END. We will return to your regularly scheduled less-whiny posts tomorrow.
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