Well, we all knew not every run could go well, right?
I hadn’t run in a week. I will make no excuses for that here. I should have run. But, I didn’t, and so my tenuous grasp on the concept of “fit to run” was, certainly, lost. I kept biking everyday, so, at least, I hadn’t spent the week in some kind of hedonistic escapades. I just didn’t put on my runnin’ shoes and hit the sidewalk.
Finally, though, I got back to doin’ what I do today. Today, of course, marked the first “hot run” of the year. The temperat ture jumped in the past week from the 60s to the 80s, with rumor of the 90s coming this weekend. Now, of my 7 runs before today, 6 had been with a bit of rain, and all 7 had taken place in cool weather. Cloudy, wet, and cool were the conditions under which I’ve run over the past few weeks. Today: hot, sunny, and dry like sandpaper. So, not only was I out of practice, physically, but the environment decided to significantly up the difficulty.
Apparently, Apollo’s cruelty is well known to runners. Says Aunt Mary:
The first couple [of hot runs] are a bitch til you get acclimated. But you will.
That’s comforting, at least.
Comfort, of course, is what I need. Because this run, as already indicated, was a bitch.
To account for the heat, I half filled a pretty large bottle of water to carry with me. I only filled it by half because there’s no way I would need the entire bottle on a 30 minute run. I just wanted enough to wet my throat, essentially. I started out, and after only about 10 minutes, I was struggling. Actually, I was struggling from the outset. My lungs felt okay, but my legs were damn exhausted, and, honestly, I don’t know why. I’ve felt dead legged for almost two weeks now, which is a condition I didn’t expect to find myself in after a week of rest.
After about 8-10 minutes of run/walk intervals (3 min: 1 min), I started struggling. I started sweating faster than I could brush away, so I let the sweat burn up my eyes a bit. Because of my dead-leggedness, and because the heat made me much more tired much more quickly than I would have expected, I decided to shorten my route a bit, thinking that after 30 minutes of running, I wouldn’t come near the 3.1-3.35 miles I’d been averaging. Well, after about 20 minutes, I was approaching my house again, and began debating internally whether I could handle an extra ten minutes of running, or if I should just call it a day.
The decision was made for me. By the sidewalk. I must have been shuffling my feet a bit in my exhaustion. I also must have been struggling to see the sidewalk through the sweat on my eyes and on my glasses. Whatever the cause, I hit the ground hard and unexpectedly. The iPod survived, somehow. That was surprising. My water bottle rolled under a pickup truck next to me. By the time a man just around the corner from me, maybe 30 feet away, had come over to check on me, my knee had started to bleed. I decided the run was finished. I walked home–no limp, but I was feeling tender. My only thought for the two block walk was: I hope I can get home before this blood reaches my socks. I’ll be honest, I think that thought is a sort of watershed moment. Maybe someday I’ll reach the point of “I’m pretty sure I can finish this race before I lose a dangerous amount of blood”.
Anyway, I ate it, and I blame exhaustion, dead-legs, and sweat-caused blindness. My legs feel okay, so if my knee can handle the friction, I’m going to try to hit the road again tomorrow.
If anyone has any suggestions for how to handle the heat while running, I’m all ears. Aunt Mary has some thought on today’s run, so we’ll pass them along when the time comes.
