September 2019 Monthly Running Challenge
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Hi all. Thanks for all the encouragement. Official time was 36:01:57. That was about 6 hours off of my goal pace. I was doing well until about 56 miles in when my light died and that slowed me down. Feet started to go at around 60 miles, and I really couldn't run after that. Other than my feet feeling pounded to hell, and some nasty chafing, I'm feeling pretty good today. Going to take a while to process this one, and get a RR out.21
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Not allowed to run till at least the weekend. Dr orders.
Got in the middle of a dog fight. If i didn't, I'm positive a dog would have died. Foster dog is back at the rescue pending behavior evaluation.
Now I'll have a few nifty scars (17...14 punctures, 3 lacerations)
Injury photos
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@mbaker566 Oh no! That must have been awful! Hope you are feeling better soon.1
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@mbaker566 Oh your poor face! Gosh, that must have been a serious fight! I’m sorry you got hurt but glad there are courageous people like you to take on the job of fostering dogs. Just wanted you to know I think highly of you, and hope you recover soon!1
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Got out on the Shelby Farms Greenline late morning, trying to swap to a morning running schedule and it was one of those runs that you just feel every step. 5 miles. It wasn’t that hot according to the thermometer - about 90 - but it felt hot. Also we are under an Orange Ozone advisory, which says people should not do prolonged outdoor activity and people with asthma should avoid the outdoors period. My husband who has exercise induced asthma did have problems, he kept coughing. We’ve had a few of these Ozone alerts recently and I’m hoping they stop soon. The sky was a funky color, absolutely cloudless but not bright blue, sort of yellowish.6
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@mbaker566 ouch! Hope you have a speedy recovery!1
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OUCH, @mbaker566!!!! You are a brave soul. Not many people would get in the middle of a dog fight. You have a beautiful soul!!!!!1
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I survived my first half marathon of 2019! It was a bit of a bear, but I made it. 36 hours later I'm still in a bit of a post-race daze, but I'll try and get a real race report up in the next day or two. Rest day today for sure. Strength training tomorrow but I'll likely take it easy.12
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MegaMooseEsq wrote: »I survived my first half marathon of 2019! It was a bit of a bear, but I made it. 36 hours later I'm still in a bit of a post-race daze, but I'll try and get a real race report up in the next day or two. Rest day today for sure. Strength training tomorrow but I'll likely take it easy.
Awesome! That post race daze can last a while. Congrats on the finish.3 -
@mbaker566 Ouch! I have been caught in a dog fight before and had some pretty nasty leg punctures. I hope you heal quickly!
@MegaMooseEsq Congrats on your half!
@MNLittleFinn I can't even imagine that run! You're awesome!
Today was a strength training day for me. I joined the local chapter of She Runs This Town, and we started an 8 week challenge today, so that should add some additional motivation for my runs.4 -
@mbaker566 Oh *puppy*! Dang girl you are brave! I hope it heals quickly! Ouch!1
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@MegaMooseEsq Congrats on your HM!0
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@mbaker566 Oh man. Talk about beast mode! Hope you heal quickly.1
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Thank you for the well wishes. The painkillers are helping me not be squirrelly. I was going to take speed demon for a trail run this morning. That's going to have to wait for a few days.
She got scraped up too so she needs rest as well.7 -
Someone told me that you can press your lens against a window and shot through the window without getting any glare, so I tried that this morning. I want to get a good sunrise one morning, but the window does not open. Well, what do you know, it actually worked!
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RACE REPORT! Watch out, because this one is LOOOOOONG.On Sunday I got to run 13.41 miles in the Sioux Falls Half Marathon. This race had been on the books for a while - my friend Bart (his wife went to college with my husband) had suggested running this together several months ago and I thought that sounded like a lot of fun.
My original race plan for the year had this as my second half marathon of the year after Beat the Blerch in Seattle at the beginning of August. As those of you who have been reading along know, this year did not go according to plan.
I took three weeks off of running in February due to getting fed up with running on packed down snow.
I took a week off at the end of March after developing pain in my left hip and hamstring.
I took two weeks off in May due to knee and hip pain.
I took a week off in June due to shin splints.
I took two weeks off in July due to shin and hamstring pain, excessive heat, and mental health issues
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Instead of running a 10K or longer race every month this year, I DNSed two races, downgraded 3 10Ks to 5Ks, and ran the Beat the Blerch 10K instead of the half.
Between October 2018 and July 2019 I also bought a house and re-gained 20 pounds.
So no, I wasn’t where I expected to be training-wise going into this weekend, but I was feeling pretty confident. I ran 10 miles last weekend with my dad and felt good after, and found out a few days before the race that Bart was actually planning to run *with* me, as opposed to both of us running the same race at our own speeds.
We drove to Sioux Falls on Friday night, arriving a bit before 10. We were staying with Bart and his wife Marie, who is a friend of my husband’s from college, and their three small children. We stay with them often when in Sioux Falls, which is where my husband went to college and his parents and sister now live.
Marie is one of my favorite people and also a bit of a night owl, so we stayed up drinking wine and admiring their 5-month-old until 2 in the morning. I then stayed up reading until 4, just to get the weekend off on the right foot.
On Saturday we visited the in-laws and then stopped off at packet pickup. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having only been to the expo for the Twin Cities Marathon, which is a substantially larger affair (10K people finished the TCM 10 Mile last year, compared to a little over 1200 in the Sioux Falls Half). The expo was very similar, just a lot smaller and quieter, which made it easy to get in and out quickly. They also did not ask for the requested release form to pick up someone else’s packet, which meant I didn’t have to call my husband in from the car to pretend to be Bart.
Saturday night a dozen of us went to an Indian restaurant to celebrate another friend’s first job as a high school teacher. I stuck to tea and somehow managed not to overeat too badly. It occurred to me later that maybe eating Indian food for the first time in over a decade might not have been a good idea the night before a race, but my iron GI system was up for the challenge.
Most of the group came back to Bart and Marie’s afterwards for homemade cheesecake and wine. I had two glasses of wine and a piece of amazing caramel apple cheesecake and excused myself around 10:30.
I did not sleep well. About par for the course.
I woke up around 4:45 and snoozed until 5:15, when I got up, drank some coffee, ate a small breakfast, and managed to post here three times on accident somehow. At 6:15 my husband drove Bart and I to the arena where the race was starting and then went to pick up his mom so they could see us off at 7.
The race started and ended inside the Denny Sanford Premier Center, basically a large sports/event center. I’d never had a race start like this and it was a LOT of fun. The race starts were staggered: the marathon started at 6:30, the half and 10K at 7:00, and the 5K at 10:15 so people could do a back-to-back if they were so inclined. The racers start on the arena floor while the spectators are up in the stands, so it was just a great environment.
My last two halves I ran with a 2:30 pacer, so my plan this time was to find a pacer at that speed or a little slower. The pace groups weren’t posted in advance but thankfully there was a 2:45 group that we were able to join up with right away.
It rained pretty hard between 5:30 at 6 and again between 6:30 and 7:00, so the race was delayed about 10 minutes. Luckily the rest of the morning was misty to a very light rain, not too windy, temps in the high 50s. Excellent running weather, but it was still very nice to be able to start and end indoors.
The first 9-10 miles went by pretty easily. Bart and I chatted with the pacer, and I was able to keep my breathing and heart rate pretty low. My shins were stiff on and off, but having good company kept the miles flying by.
The route itself was mostly flat (it’s South Dakota) and quite nice, going through several nice parks along the bank of the Sioux River, and right through the historic downtown. I was hugely impressed by the cheering sections, too - even in the grey drizzling people really turned out, including one man with a small boy who managed to get to four different places on the course, and some teenage girls downtown who were screaming so loud I joked that they were working harder than we were.
Somewhere after mile 10, though, things started to get tough. I started counting my inhales and exhales, my glutes went from stiff to sore to painful, and my knees and shins decided to get in on the fun too. I started walking on the few very slight uphill portions, but we managed to catch up with the pacer each time.
I pretty much just stared at the back of the pacer’s shirt for a mile or two, counting my breath, then about a mile from the finish I started to think I was going to barf. It wasn’t a GI thing so much as an exhausted, painful kind of thing, if that makes sense. I decided I’d rather walk across the finish line then risk losing my cookies, so we waved on our pacer and walked for a half a mile or so.
Once the door to the arena was in sight I started running again, and I managed to cross the finish line at a run. I saw Marie at the finish line along with my husband and mother-in-law, and I actually started crying a little.
Bart and I at the finish line!
After we got water and our medals, I wandered off to a quiet corner and actually did cry a bit. I’ve never cried after a race, but for some reason I just got hit by this overwhelming wave of emotion: happiness and relief that I finished on my feet, sadness over losing @MobyCarp, and a little bit of frustration at how many setbacks I had to deal with this year. Mostly, though, I felt incredibly fortunate that, in spite of all the physical pain and mental health struggles, I was able to do this once again.
Once I pulled myself together I found my cheering section and headed out. I was pretty cold at this point, and thankfully we didn’t have far to walk to the car. Back home I had a fabulously long, hot shower, ate bacon and a cinnamon roll with friends and family, and then took a two and a half hour nap.
My knees, shins, and glutes were all quite unhappy after the race, but thankfully the shin and knee pain faded and was gone by today, although my glutes are still sore and my quads are now so tight that going downstairs is a bit of a struggle. I probably should have done some stretching before/after my nap, and again before/after the four hour drive home that took closer to five-and-a-half hours because my husband and I were both having a hard time staying alert. So it goes. As soon as I post this novel I’m going to roll my quads and do a Yoga For Sore Legs video, and hopefully most of the remaining aches and pains will be gone tomorrow.
I decided to count yesterday as a distance PR, as my second half came in .02 miles shorter, and my watch died within sight of the finish line for my first half so I don’t have an official distance for that one. It was absolutely my slowest half, but I really can’t be upset about that. I finished! 111 out of 113 in the F35-39 group, and honestly I'm a little bummed I got so close to being DFL and yet so far (#113 finished almost 20 minutes after I did). I just checked and Bart did manage to come in last in his age group, so that's the sign of a real friend.
Looking back at my records, I realized that I ran my very first half exactly one year ago - a pretty neat coincidence. Even more of a coincidence, my total miles run for 2018 before that half was 247.08, while my total miles for this year is 246.21. Of course, last year I’d run almost 70 more miles in the three months prior to my half, which is doubtless why I was able to finish 19 minutes faster. So it goes.
Since I have to wrap this up somehow, I just want to thank all of you for being such an amazing support group. I can’t imagine having done this without you.
September Total: 18.27 miles
September Goals: Run 70 miles, lift minimum 2x/week, 15 minutes/day of moderate cardio, 15 minutes/day of mobility.
2019 Races! (bold registered)
January 26: Securian 10K, St. Paul, MN Chip time: 1:05:07
February 16: Half Fast 10K DNS - weather
March 23: Hot Dash 5K, Mpls, MN Chip time: 0:28:39 (*PR!)
May 19: Women Run the Cities 5K, Mpls, MN Chip time: 0:33:02
June 8: PHRC Pensieve 10K (virtual)
June 12: ESTRS French 5K, Plymouth, MN DNS - injury
June 29 Lift Bridge 5K, Bayport MN Chip time: 0:32:51
August 3: Beat the Blerch 10K, Carnation, WA
September 2: MDRA Victory Labor Day 5K, Mpls, MN Chip time: 0:33:04
September 8: Sioux Falls Half Marathon, Sioux Falls, SD Chip time: 2:47:13 (in memory of @MobyCarp)
October 5: TCM 10K, St. Paul, MN
October 6: TCM 10Mi, Minneapolis to St. Paul, MN
October 12: Bemidji Blue Ox 26K, Bemidji, MN
November 28: Turkey Trot St. Paul 10K, St. Paul, MN
December 14: Reindeer Run 10K, Mpls, MN15 -
Way to go on your half @MegaMooseEsq! And great race report!0
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Great job @MegaMooseEsq0
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Way to go on your half @MegaMooseEsq! And great race report!
This!0
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