12.81 Miles of Complete and Utter Hell

As I am learning, training for a marathon is hard work. I knew it would be, but until I was knee deep in it and doing it, I don't think I realized how much of a challenge it would be. What makes it even worse? Doing it in the winter.

Sunday was supposed to be a 14 mile run. After my 11.26 miles, I figured I could add 2 and a half miles and be ok to manage. And the truth is, I probably would have been, had a few things not happened all at once to make it a challenge. Remember the movie "A Perfect Storm?" Which for those of you from New England, you can probably remember the storm itself. I grew up far enough inland that we had a "hurricane" but it wasn't anything as fancy as my siblings and I were hoping for. When you are an adolescent, some how the roof tearing off the house takes on a coolness factor that adults don't seem to share. Anyhoo. My reason for bringing that storm and movie up is that each of the pieces by themselves weren't anything unusual, but you converge them all at once and things get messy.

So here comes my run on Sunday. And I watched as the forecast kept saying Sunday was going to be colder and colder and colder. And it was. 23 degrees with a "feels like" temperature of 14 degrees. Wow. Ok, so cold. But it add to the cold a brutal, chapping wind at 9.2 mph. Now let me give you a sense of scale here. On average, I run somewhere around a 5.4 mph pace. It's not fast. Throw a 9.2 mile an hour wind in my face and guess what happens. Yep. I grind to a halt. So 14 miles, brutal weather. And I am gonna make it just a little worse. I am under calories from the day before and I knew it. It wasn't intentional or anything... the day got away from me. But lord when you are out there doing 14 miles, there's not a lot of room for error.

So there I go. And wouldn't you know it, I cannot get warm. There is nothing worse than running when you can't get warm. My quads always felt like they were about to lock up. My calves weren't much better. And as time went on, and here I was fighting the wind, I noticed the water in my fuel belt was starting to freeze around the periphery of the bottles. Worse yet, the nozzles froze quickly, so as I was running and running and running, I was having to really breathe on these things to get any water out.

In the end, I pulled out 12.81 miles. But wow, it may have been my slowest run of all time 11:20 pace. The thing about running in NYC is no matter where you go, you hit that damn street grid. I love the grid, don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of the grid and the Commissioner's Plan in Manhattan that kind of set the pace for a lot of the expansion in other boroughs, but not when it becomes a wind channel in my face. I just could not catch a break. The wind just funnels itself between these buildings and speeds up a little and can just plain suck. And this did.

When I got home from that run, I couldn't get my hat off. It had frozen to my hair. Literally. There was ice on it. Now mind you, I have run in plenty of cold before. I kind of like it, to be honest. But not like this. I needed to catch a break and I just couldn't. And it sucked. It took me forever to warm up. I shivered and shook through my stretching, to say the least. And then took a nice hot bath.

During the run my knees felt decent. After the run, my right knee was a little sore again, so I have to keep icing it more tonight as I am going to sleep. Tomorrow morning I am up nice and early for a run with my old running buddy, which will be such a welcome change of pace. So that's where things stand for now. I don't care if I have to fight this battle mile ontop of mile each week, I will do it. Let's just hope that was the worst run of the season, shall we?

And thanks to all who keep the donations to my cause coming in. I promise to write more about that topic this week... but this is already a little long, so I am going to leave it here.

Happy Monday, all.