jimsjournal
| March Hare Hop -- 03/02/03 |
jimsjournal |
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Hey, I did it. I survived that three mile road race today. Well, sort of... My left heel is killing me. That plantar fascitis flared up and has me limping badly. Okay, not so much limping as lurching and stumbling and staggering. It was pouring rain today. Forty degrees and rain, extremely heavy rain at times, mixed with occasional periods of light rain, as if it would clear up, but just as you got your hopes up, it would pour again. Yester day (Saturday) was a tired day. I was tired. I had to get up in the middle of the night to drive Sean and a friend from scouts up to Warwick (half an hour drive) to catch a bus at 5:15 a.m. to go snowboarding in Vermont. I took a nap when I got back home but I was dragging all day. Usual weekend chores, go to supermarket and spend too much money to buy food and then to produce store and then to butcher shop. Then I had to go back up there and meet their return bus about quarter past eight at night. They had really nice weather for snowboarding yesterday. Have I mentioned that it rained today? Jennifer had said she wanted to run with me today but after working all night she came home and went to bed. I woke her around 10:30 to see if she was still interested. She wasn't sure... so I told her it was a simple choice: she could get out of her warm bed to run three miles in a cold rainstorm or she could snuggle back under the covers and go to sleep and run a race with me on some nice sunny spring day. Since I put it like that, she opted to go back to sleep. Nancy came over with me. She had done that last year, said that she'd had a pleasant time wandering around through some of the shops in Mystick Village (a collection of tourist-oriented shops near Mystic Aquarium) while I ran the race, so she agreed to come this year too. There were fewer runners than most years -- even though the weather is usually not very pleasant for this race (but what can you expect on the first Sunday in March in New England?), this year's downpour had to be the worst weather for this event that I've seen (this was, I believe, the fifth time I've run it). By the time I was a mile into the run I had to take off my glasses and carry them in my right hand -- the rain drops on them were bad enough, but then they had begun to fog up -- and with my vision I was just trying to follow the blurs in front of me. This was an out-and-back race, the turn-around point at the halfway mark was up a hill and my left heel began to hurt as I went up that hill. I had been running fairly well during the first half, but began to lose proper form as the discomfort in my heel increased. It didn't get really bad until the last half mile... roughly a quarter mile of up hill running (which hurt!) and then a final quarter mile of level running along an access road and through the back of the parking lot to the finish line. Nancy snapped this picture of me approaching the finish line. Wet, very wet, although coming into the finish line was one of those moments when the rain was fairly light. It was a much darker day than this; I brightened the picture in PhotoSuite.
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