RUN 20 miles in 5 hours!
To be more specific, the first 17 miles was a run/walk in 4:06, then the last three miles was the next 54 mins.
My overall goals were to hit the magical 20 miles, to stay in a "can breath through the nose" level of exertion, and nail hydration. Succeeded there on all counts. But failed on the not-specified-but-assumed "don't get injured" goal.
Beautiful day and an early start. The tree worms were out again (remember that from last year too!?) so I was constantly wiping them off my face, with no luck I might add. One thing I love about this trail is the canopy pretty much obscures the sun entirely, it seems like a cloudy day but isn't. And it was all podcast the entire time: greenfield sleep episode, SYSK on LSD, ooooh forgetting already. Oh the therapy podcast with the uptalking girl, hard to take her abortion and binge eating problems seriously with uptalk. That's mean of me, LOL!
TV busy with Mother's Day so I was on my own. The route was the 10 mile DeClue/Dogwood loop that I'm familiar with. This time I decided to run it backwards starting on Dogwood. In the first mile, I took a hard fall. Tripped over something, kinda started to recover, but then spilled onto a pile of rocks at the bottom of a short descent. OH F^CK this hurt. One of my paranoias is landing on rocks. Entire left arm (on the top of it, rolled up onto shoulder), left hit scraped, left quad squarely hit, right knee on inside, and right palm all screaming. I sat only a few seconds then told myself to get up and move. Just move.
No major bleeding, some minor scrapes. Within minutes there was a knot in the quad and swelling on the knee. At 1.12 miles!? I walked a bit to calm down and test how things felt, then started out slow. The pains didn't go away the entire run, but were somewhat better if I was running and moving. Stopping just made things hard to start up again.
As usual, something like this just left me distracted and I just stuttered and stumbled all the more. It took 2:15 to reach over the 9.2 mile point, and I'd told myself that I would turn around at 2:15. My original plan of looping was over-ridden by the choice to do out n back. I wanted to be sure I didn't cut out after the first loop! Surprise and disappointment at seeing the time and distance numbers, not the run I was hoping for.
The run back seemed to go by faster. I looked ahead to landmarks, a sign or road crossing or creek, and did minor celebrating at each one. The trails were quiet aside from a few bikers, horses, and my stomach passing gas :)
I returned to Dogwood and realized the Garmin was off somewhere -- I was gaining nearly a mile on the way back? This helped my spirits a bit, but by mile 17 I was cooked and reduced to a walk. Everything was OK for hydration, nutrition a bit low (only a bag of chips and a powerbar consumed), but the pain and distraction were too much. I was stumbling over anything and at a few points the urge to cry fleeted through my head. The urge to punch a tree usually followed that feeling. Yeah, not doing great.
But so close! My goal of 20 miles only needed a half mile out n back that I did by walking up to and around the Roundhouse shelter. Got my 20 beep right at 5 hours. At 19.7 the Camelbak was empty. If I really wanted to keep going or wake up more, I could have eaten the gel I had but figured walking doesn't need gels.
The injuries hurt. I could barely bend my right knee, and anything that stretched the quad burned. The bruising hadn't developed yet and I was trying to ignore it until I could clean up and get some ice. Oh, driving, that really hurt. Shifting and braking....
Once home I briefly iced to no obvious benefit so I just tried to stay active and not couch potato. See what tomorrow brings.
NUMERICS
Bike 32 miles
Bike commute 50 miles
Run 48.5 miles
Total of 13.5 hours, which doesn't include the bike commute time.
No wonder I'm tired.
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