AGONY!

Yesterday’s 13 miles run was pure AGONY, all 11.84 miles of it. I didn’t quite make it to 13 miles, I had to cut the run short due to dehydration, lack of fuel and a timing deadline. I was by far one of the worst runs I’ve had in a while: my legs felt like deeply rooted trees that I had to pull out of the ground to take every step, my lips were parched and my stomach was growling for food I didn’t have. The worst part was my legs. That dead weight feeling, I haven’t felt that since mile 24, 25 and 26 of the Phoenix Rock ‘n Roll Marathon–the one where I vowed I would never run another marathon again.

The first three or four miles were OK, I felt good. At 5.5 miles I had to walk for a bit, and the rest of my run was punctuated with walking–I HATE walking. I feel like such a failure when I walk. Around mile seven I started to get a second wind, I felt like my body finally realized my mind was in it for the long haul and decided it would get on board with the whole running-thirteen-miles-thing. Of course, around eight miles there was a huge hill, so I walked again. At that point I stopped caring about walking, and started to mentally kick myself for not taking my water belt and some GU. I bought the belt expressly for the purpose of remaining hydrated on long runs like this one. Maybe it was the fact that my past two runs have been in the rain, or the fact that I’m not running in Arizona anymore, or the way I had to bolt out the door as soon as my husband got home at 2pm so I could get in my run before he had to leave again at 4pm. Whatever it was, I didn’t think, was unprepared and therefore suffered the consequences: AGONY.

Once I accepted the fact it was OK to walk, I thought about walking the rest of the way home, the only thing that kept me running (if you could call it that, it was more like a stiff-legged shuffle, with my sneakers clearing the pavement by a mere tic-tac length) was my 4pm deadline and a kind gentleman who called out to me at the very beginning of my run.

Around the end of mile one I ran past a home where a gentleman was making his way from his car to the front porch, he had a cane in his left hand and was gingerly walking up the path towards his house. He paused, waved and called out: “Good for you! Wish I was 10 years younger and could keep up.” Even when my legs felt their heaviest, my lips their driest and my stomach its emptiest I thought of what that man said. ‘I am lucky to be out here,’ I thought, ‘to have the ability to run 11.84 miles (even if it is 1.16 miles short of my 13 mile goal), to put one foot in front of the other, to take in a beautiful spring day.’ Even if I was ill prepared, and at times the run did feel like agony, the truth is I am BLESSED.