into-the-blue.com

Yesterday I had my first ice bath ever.

On Saturday I ran my first road race ever. On Sunday I raced my 5th triathlon of the year. Over the last week I’ve run 26 miles.

Me. The former president of the anti-running league.

Somehow Little Ms. Satan conned me into entering the Bill Luti 5 miler on Saturday. “It’ll be fun”, she said. “You’ll do just fine”, she said. Of course she omitted to remind me that we’d also entered a triathlon the following day.

Saturday arrived and Mr. Clueless wannabe runner and the devil’s minion arrived at the race where I was introduced to some of her fellow runners. “Let’s go for a warm-up”, they all said. “That sounds perfectly reasonable”, I thought.

Now remember I had never even been to a running race, much less participated in one. My idea of a warm-up was some mild amount of stretching and some aimless windmilling of the arms.

Then we started running. For the first 30 seconds or so I thought we were just doing about 30 seconds of running.

When we exited the general area and showed no signs of slowing down, stopping or turning around I started to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. When we reached about 3/4 mile we finally turned around and breezed back to the race’s starting point. On the way back Michael was kind enough to mention that the first mile was downhill and then you hit a somewhat unpleasant hill. I think he very smartly understated the nastiness of the hill. The general idea was to take the first mile slowly.

Starting time at the race approached and we sidled ourselves up to the starting line. As the gun went off, Kerry the 4′11″ giant ruthlessly elbowed her way through a pack of runners twice her size, made an end-run around a bunch of other runners, and blasted off into the distance. I followed at what I thought was a more sedate pace.

When we hit mile 1 in 6:30 and runners that I knew were MUCH better than me were only about 20 feet in front of me, I knew I was in trouble.

Then I saw the hill. And cried a little inside.

The next mile was a mountain of pain and suffering. The remaining three weren’t all that much better and some 30 or so minutes after the first mile I managed to stagger over the finish line thinking that I’d just entered the 11th level of hell because that nasty little she-devil was at the finish line waiting to welcome me home.

After having survived the hill climb from hell, the devil incarnate suggested that we go for a cool-down. This time I was prepared - I knew we’d do some amount of running. When we started running the same way we’d done for the warm-up I was pretty comfortable that I’d be able to survive the cool-down.

When we passed the turnaround point from the warm-up and continued going after hanging a left, things started to look a little grim. 3+ miles later we finished the cool-down.

Now let me add up a couple of numbers here: 1.5 mile warm-up + 5 mile race + 3.5 mile cool-down = 10 miles! I’ve never run that much in a day. Ever. And we (or so, I thought, ‘we’) had a triathlon the next day. Freaking marvelous.

Early morning Sunday arrived and Kerry said “You know honey, my sciatica is acting up badly. I don’t think I’m going to race today because I’ve got cross-country camp this week and I need to be functional for it”.

Chicken.

I, of course, sucked it up and decided to race anyway despite the fact that the near-useless appendages at the bottom of my torso were barely functional. I mean how badly could a 1/3 mile swim, 13 mile bike ride and 4 mile run hurt after getting my legs trashed by running 10 miles the day before?

As it turns out, it didn’t hurt too badly - I just couldn’t will my legs to run fast. My swim time was ok - 6th fastest split, the bike was great - 3rd fastest split, and the run was slow. Despite only managing a 7:45 pace I still managed the 17th fastest run split for a 6th place overall and 2nd in my age group. Triathletes can’t run worth shit.

That, of course, brought me to the ice bath. I think I’m going to have another one tonight.

And a track workout is in the immediate future.