Crazy Day

Today was a crazy day. It was the first planned 20 miler in our marathon training plan. M and I woke up fairly early and headed out to our trail about 30 minutes away. At the beginning, it was very cold and neither of us was too excited about running around in the freezing cold for more than 3 hours. About 5 miles in, it started to rain. This is to be expected of Seattle in January so I just sort of thought, yeah, ok, I'll deal with it. I slogged through the rain from mile 5-11, not happy but keeping my head down and just doing it. Then, suddenly, it started to HAIL! And boy do I mean hail!! I started laughing hysterically because really, what else can you do? I had a hat on, thankfully, so I just had to keep running! There can often be a passing hail shower for a few minutes and then it goes back to rain. But, it started to snow. Big fat flakes at first, then really snowing in earnest. Keep in mind, we are out on a trail, 30 minutes from home and 9 miles from where we parked our car! The choice was to try to run 9 miles back to the car knowing that would take at least 1.5 hours, or to bail on the most critical run in our training program. I kept on slogging through the slush and snow even though I was completely soaked to the bone. Finally though, I thought "I can probably still run the marathon if I get frostbite on my fingers, but I don't know about my toes." and that's when I realized we needed to bail. If you are even thinking about frostbite it's time to give in and be sensible (for marathon runners at least). I waited for Michelle under a bridge at the 13 mile mark. We agreed to run a short distance to a nearby brewery to get warm, have some food, and call a cab to take us back to our car. We had two cups of coffee and big bowls of soup, our hands shaking so much we could barely eat. We sat next to a roaring fire trying to dry off. Finally, our taxi came and drove us back to our car. On the longish ride back, I realized how far it is that we had run! Once we drove home, we pulled in to my neighborhood and the weather SERIOUSLY looked like this. The sun was shining, the snow was melted, it was gorgeous. Being the kind-of-badass that I am, I changed into dry running clothes, laced up my new dry running shoes, and headed out to finish the last 7 miles of my 20 mile run. I don't know that this will really count the same as it would have running the whole distance in a more conventional way...but sometimes you just have to adapt to conditions and preparing for that is good practice in and of itself. I knocked off the 7 miles in relatively easy fashion. And, if I need to take a two hour break in the middle of the marathon for coffee, soup, and a cab ride in wet clothes, I will be prepared!


Just realized that a year ago today, I got my tattoo! Apparently January 14th is a badass day for me! Happy birthday tattoo!