2 Weeks ‘Til My 10th Half Marathon!
This morning Alicia and I ran our last long run in our training for the Hollywood Half Marathon! As so often happens with our training, we set out with the best intentions of doing our training seriously and attempting for personal bests. I mean, I was just finishing up the running study I was participating in that required me to run four days per week, which meant I was in the groove of training and had set a good foundation for the training for this half. But, as also so often happens, training plans did not go according to plan. I blame a combination of darkness, snain ((Snain is a portmanteau of snow and rain and I used it to describe this precipitation that we get in Vancouver where it’s not quite snow, but not quite rain. It combines the making-you-soaking-wet-when-you-are-out-in-it property of rain with the coldness of snow and somehow the synergy of the two makes for the worst kind of precipitation to run in.)), and the plague.
Usually when I run a half marathon in the spring, it happens in May (BMO Vancouver) or June (Scotiabank Vancouver, Edge to Edge in Tofino), which means that by the time I have to start training, the days are long enough that it’s still light out when I get home from work, so I can throw on my running shoes and do my training. Not so when you train for an early April race – for most of the training period, it’s dark when you leave for work and it’s dark when you get home. And since I hate treadmills with the fire of thousand suns – and was extremely sick of treadmills after completing the running study – I just couldn’t motivate myself to go to the gym to do my running. And then it seemed like every time I made a plan to go for a run after work – usually in a valiant effort to do my hill training or speed work – it would snain. Or snow. Or some other ridiculous thing that would make it rather unsafe to go running up and down a hill. And then, about two weeks ago, probably precipitated by running 18 km and playing three playoff hockey games in one weekend, I got sick. I’m pretty sure it’s just a really bad cold, but it was so bad that I actually had to stay home from work! If you know me, you know that I almost never stay home from work ((A habit that I picked up from my father, the man with the world’s most incredible work ethic in the history of work ethic.)) so the fact that I stayed home meant I was pretty much on my death bed. I woke up with a screaming sore throat, a massive headache, a bunch of other random aches and pains and was fully intending to go to work, but when I got up and fed the cats and found that just opening a can of cat food exhausted me, I called in sick. And then slept for 6 more hours, despite having slept a full night’s sleep. Since then, I’ve been trying to be reasonable, which for me means I’ve only run my long runs (18 km last Saturday and 20 km today) and played my hockey games, and have deliberately rested to try to recover ((I really haven’t been pleased about this given that it’s smack in the middle of the 90 day challenge, but I guess it’s a combination of (a) me trying to be sensible for once and (b) the fact that this virus (I’m assuming it’s a cold that I have) being particularly virulent in the making-me-exhausted department, so I haven’t had the energy to do much else.)). I’m feeling a fair bit better today than I have been, except for the lingering cough. Poor Alicia had to listen to me coughing for the entire 20 km of our run. I’ve got two weeks to shake this cough before the race, so hopefully I still don’t have it when we fly down to LA!
If you happen to find any typos in this blog posting, it’s not my fault. I blame my copy editor:
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Tags: cats, half marathon, Hollywood, Hollywood Half Marathon, milestones, running, training, travel