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| What should the caption here be? Perhaps "You know you have a problem when ..."? Or "Imelda Marcos would be proud"? |
Evening beach run on a rather hot late September fall day. Stepped awkwardly (barefoot) through a pile of rocks and bruised the arch of my right foot. Otherwise, it was all good on a warm evening and I finished up with a jump into the ocean.
Tuesday: 6
Hot, hot day for late September. 83 degrees and hot high Noon sun. Made a poor choice to run roads and paid for it. North End roads. Slow pace at almost 8 minutes and quickly dehydrated. Not fun.
Weird thing happened in the evening. Was grilling in my backyard when I heard a loud rustling sound that seemed to be emanating from my woods. Walked out there to find a neighbor dragging cut tree branches onto my property, and I asked what he was doing. He said the tree branches looked ugly near his house, so he was dragging them back here. Oh, so YOUR trees that YOU cut down looked ugly on YOUR property, so you dragged them on to my property. While I believe him that he truly didn't know where the boundary was, it still frosted me that he illegally dumped on my property and blocked my perimeter trail in many places so that it's not even passable anymore. He did agree to drag them all back. This is at least the 4th time that someone has dumped yard waste on some portion of my property. End of rant. Harumph.
Wednesday: 6
Dedham, MA. Body just didn't want to move. Had originally thought of running repeats on Wilson Mountain, but clearly that wasn't happening. Ran a 2-mile loop through Whitaker Woods, and then connected to run a single loop up and around Wilson Mountain.
Thursday: 11
AM: 5 miles on local roads out to Avondale. 73 degrees and dripping humidity at 6am made this run just plain unenjoyable.
PM: 6 miles setting up WHS XC course for their meet. Other than forgetting to bring the mile markers, all went well.
Friday: 3
Late afternoon mowing of upper field XC trail at Bradford Preserve. Includes running to and fro with a can of gasoline.
Saturday: 15
Met up with Tommy and Mikey at 7am for a trail run / workout in Bradford Preserve and Woody. After a short warm-up, we ran 10 x (1-minute hard, 1-minute easy). On downhills and twisty stuff, I could stay pretty close to Tommy; the rest of the stuff I was trailing him. After the workout, Mike surprised me by asking to run the new RINEMBA trails, so that's what we did! Pour Judgment is clearly my favorite of the lot. We finished with about 11 miles, and I went out for a few more solo.
The afternoon and evening got really weird and a bit scary. At the risk of TMI, I've been having some mild, dull lower abdominal pain for about 3 weeks now. It was dull enough that I ignored it hoping it would go away. (That's the proper response, right?) Fast forward to today, as when I got home the pain turned acute to the extent that it hurt any time I walked or moved. Something is wrong, so when the sharp pain continued after lunch, I went to South County Urgent Care to have it checked out. After two hours, I finally got seen and after some poking around, I was told that I likely had appendicitis, but they needed a CT scan to confirm, so I needed to go to SC Hospital ER right away, and they first suggested an ambulance. Between the ambulance suggestion and Google results showing the solution is immediate surgery, I was starting to get scared. My first concern was all the running I would miss, much like my ventral hernia surgery a few years back when I lost three weeks of running and was going stir-crazy. At about 8pm, I had fallen asleep in my hospital bed in the ER, when they came in to give me the results. Good news: I do NOT have appendicitis, there is nothing dangerous or concerning, and I mostly likely am having some sort of abdominal muscular issue that they are asking me to avoid heavy lifting or strenuous work, and are referring me to my PCP for. Whew! What a relief! No surgery, and no running interruption.
Sunday: 14
Made an early morning trek to Madison, CT for a "Bimbler's Bite", which is a series of samples of the Bimbler course. Got there 10 minutes early. Sat in my car looking at my phone like the introverted geek that I am. When others started to get out about 5 minutes before, I joined them. A woman named Molly looked at my license plate and asked if I really drove all the way from RI. I thought that was an odd question given that she had NH plates (she and I were the only out-of-staters). Anyway, a few of us were talking and it seemed like I was the only one that had never run a 50K race before, so I felt out of place, until we started running and then all was good in my world.
We started out with a group of 16, but quickly broke into separate groups based on pace. A group of six of us formed the lead pack, led by a runner named Joe who had run Bimbler's 6 times before and had the course map loaded on his watch. Mostly I ran and talked with Molly, as we ran 2nd and 3rd place, and it was easy to talk to her about our respective running backgrounds and races. At points Joe would have us stop and wait for the rest of our merry band to regroup. A few times I felt I wanted to pick up the pace more, but as a guest on the run, I didn't want to be a d!ck and constantly run ahead of the leader (which I inadvertently did once). The climbing and terrain were more than I expected and by the end of the run, my legs had had enough, and I was already gone longer than planned, so I quickly got in the car and headed back to RI.
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| View from Bluff Head |
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| View from Bluff Head |
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| Neat farmhouse, framed by a view of the bluff we had just run down from |
Weekly synopsis: Happy with this week's volume and getting two medium-long trail runs in during the weekend. Finally, the weather turned more fall-like as we headed into October with Sunday's run 43 degrees at the start. Next week we have the Pumpkins race, but falling on a Saturday of a long weekend, I'm hoping for another reasonably high mileage week.
Weekly highlight: The Bimbler's Bite trail run. Got me out of my comfort zone of only running with people I know, ran in an entirely new area to me, and took in some great single-track trails and views.
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