Month: September 2016

Run For It 5k

Davis, WV

September 24, 2016

 

‘Why don’t you walk with me?’  My cousin ‘Kigali’ Claire had flown in from Rwanda the previous day with a tantalizing idea.

I sighed.  ‘That sounds awfully nice.’  The pain that had angered my left kneecap on Monday was still making me limp.  I’d also gotten my period that morning and was doubled over, both hands clutching the belly.  I was still in sweatpants even though the sun was getting wicked hot.  I did not look like much of a runner.  ‘I wish I could.’

She shot me a perplexed look.  We hadn’t seen each other much over the last decade, ever since she started her grand life adventure tour of Beijing-London-Berlin-Kigali.

‘Aaron said I should pick priority races.  I should be less of a turd runner.   So I picked three special races this year to focus on.  I planned my work travel schedule around them.  I trained.  And then I missed the first two because I was injured.  I sucked double butt this year at Priority Races.  Today is my last chance.’

‘But this isn’t a marathon or anything.  Why’d you choose this one?’

‘I didn’t pick my races because they were big things.  But they have a special place in my heart.  Laurel was my first ultra.  Escarpment was my first trail race.  And Run For It is this awesome little race in our beloved Canaan Valley.  For the past 5 years I’ve wanted to run it.  And every year there’s a stupid conflict: a work trip, a Bar Mitzvah, an injury…’

‘Wait, you’ve never run it before?’  Cecily had woken up at the crack of dawn and driven three hours….for what exactly?

‘No, never,’ I sighed again in resignation.  ‘That’s why I need to run today.’

~          ~          ~

Aaron, Cecily, Claire, and I were all on the Heart of the Highlands team.  What makes Run For It so unique is the prize structure.  You don’t win prize money for yourself, but for the charity you’ve designated.  The overall winner gets $1000 to the charity of their choosing, second place is $750, third is $500, etc.  Age group winners get $100.  Our friend Dan Lehman was organizing the Heart of the Highlands team to raise money for trail building.  I was torn because there was also a Tucker County Animal Shelter team.  But Dan is awesome.  And Aaron and I live for Canaan’s trails.  But I vowed that if the TCAS didn’t raise much money this year, next time I’d run for the kitties.

I’ve learned that the start of 5k races are shit shows.  All the kids position themselves right at the starting line, and it’s like a herd of cats.  Some flash out like it’s a 100 yard dash.  Others plod along, causing ripple effects of destruction as the mob wildly circles around.  I took an elbow to the face, realized I was totally boxed in at the mob’s center, and sprinted to the outside to find some clearing.  It got my heart rate shooting up so high, I coasted on pure terror and adrenaline all the way to the front pack, ahead of the other women.

I found myself playing my favorite running game with 2 dudes.  The game is called Weeeee Down the Hills!  Booooooooo Up the Hills!  I’d get passed by both dudes up all the hills, then flip a switch and pass them both down the hills.  It occurred to me that bombing down hills wasn’t the best thing for my injured shin and knee.  But try telling that to the lungs.

Now, Aaron and I’d had a pre-race conversation that went something like this:

‘So the race winds around up like a snake through the neighborhood.  You start out going east and then….’

‘No, no, no,’ I cut him off.  ‘Don’t confuse me.  There are mile markers.  I’ll be fine.’

~          ~          ~

Marmots should perhaps glance at course maps.  They don’t like to, with all those confusing squizzly lines.  There was a marker for Mile 1.  But that only made it more disturbing when there was no marker for Mile 2.

The course was a lot harder than I anticipated.  All those hills gave me and my 2 dudes plenty of turf to play our little hill game, switching the lead at least 10 times.  It was also a lot hotter than it was supposed to be.  By the 11am start time the sun was blaring.  Claire deeply regretted wearing jeans.

My legs got heavier and heavier with each hill.  Maybe it was because my racing flats were packed in storage.  Aaron and I are moving into a new home on September 30th, and in order to sell my apartment we’ve been homeless since late August.  We remembered to keep toothbrushes and and checkbooks, but barely a day went by without me realizing I needed something that had been packed away.  You know I’m all messed up when I don’t even have any gummies to carry on my runs (I finally found some raisins).  Poor Aaron’s going full bush this month because he packed his sideburn clippers.

Or maybe my legs were heavy because I’d run the NIH 5 x 800m relay two days earlier.  Not the best plan to barely run all summer and then try to sprint a half mile.  Even stupider to follow up your little Intro to Speedwork with a 5k two days later.  But our FIC Globetrotters relay team nabbed its first top-10 finish in history (this was the 33rd year of the NIH relay), finishing 7th out of 107 teams.  It was worth it.

Or maybe I felt like death because I hadn’t been sleeping for a month.  Doug and Kerry have been extraordinarily gracious in letting me and Aaron crash at their pad in Woodley Park for our month of homelessness.  But marmots, like kitties, are poor at adjustment.  The marmot has been through the ringer this summer, particularly the last month.  My poor kitty got so stressed out living with my parents that she scratched her ear, making a hematoma that needs to be surgically removed.  I detailed my own typical night in my last blog post, The Hungry Badger.

But if I had to make a top-10 list for why my legs felt like lead, it would go something like this:

10. Had to wear clunky trail shoes;

9. Got my period that morning;

8. Had gummy bears for breakfast;

7. Blasting sun heat (wearing just a sports bra was a good call);

6. The elevation profile looked like this:

5. Haven’t been running much (injured all summer)

4. Tired from the NIH relay

3. Despair that I still hadn’t reached a second mile mark 18 minutes into the race

2. A month of not sleeping

1. A month of not having my kitty.

But this race was my last chance at redemption.  2016 was supposed to be a big race year for me.  The sixes always are.  In 1996 I was a State Champion in cross country.  In 2006 I ran my first Boston Marathon.  I had big plans for 2016.

My time wasn’t very fast (19:09).  I was not my peppy self.  I didn’t even have the energy to give a thumbs up to folks cheering from their lawn chairs.  But I finished right in between the 2 dudes, one ahead and one behind, and won the women’s race.  Aaron made sure that I stepped back after the race and gave myself a smidgen of credit for rallying.  It was a tough course, a hot day, I wasn’t in race shape, and I still beat a  WVU trackster by a margin as wide as Aaron was ahead of me by.  Thumbing through the results going back to 2009, I couldn’t find a female who’d run faster.  Sure, it’s a little local race of a couple hundred people.  But after feeling like I’ve been through a blender these last months, particularly low after I wasn’t even in shape to run the Women’s Half Marathon, it was nice to see even a shard of daylight.  And together, Cecily (2nd in her age group), Aaron (3rd overall), and I brought in $1,600 for Heart of the Highlands!

Overall, Run For It was everything I’d dreamed it would be, rivaling This Race Is For the Birds in small-town spirit and adorableness.  I kid you not one of the 5k finishers was 99 years old!  It will definitely be on the try-our-damnedest-to-do-every-year list.  No matter how beat down I get, I oughta be able to go 3 miles.

We celebrated with a glorious sunny jam at the Leaf Peepers Festival (bought some WV honey mead), a starlit hot tub at PJ’s house, and a gorgeous bike ride around the valley the next day.   For a flicker of time, I forgot about the last months: the pain and injury, the hunger and the sleeplessness, my kitty’s poor ear, and the sense that all my belongings are scattered across so many places (storage, my parents’ house, my office, Woodley) that sometimes I can’t recall where my toothbrush is.  For one day, out in the Valley, even the Donald didn’t exist.

The first sign that I’m starving is sweat.  It’s 2am and a thin layer of moisture has pooled across my chest.  It will leave funny little bumps in the morning.  Through my slumber I can feel droplets tickle my chest as they funnel their way towards my belly button.  I’ve been dreaming about food for some time now.  Vine-ripened tomatoes and mozzarella.  A filet I can cut with a butter knife.  I’m overheating and have kicked off blankets.  It’s called my ‘reaction’.

I imagine that if I just squeeze my eyes tight I’ll fall back to sleep, dreaming of tomatoes again.  I’m so dog tired.

But I know that in the Battle of Tired v. Hungry, Hungry almost always wins.  Hungry is the Duke Blue Devils of my nights: the little fuckers that always win.

Hungry is a little green leprechaun dancing on my chest, singing Time to Get Up.  Time for Snausages!

I try to convince the leprechaun that 2am is actually not a great time for snausages.

But I know the drill.  It’s been particularly bad lately, but the Reactions have been going on for years.  My body is churning, and the longer I lie in bed, the angrier it will get.  My legs are already starting the throb.

I’m not used to having to navigate stairs to get to the kitchen.  We didn’t have stairs at Macomb Street.  I have to grip the bannister with one hand and steady myself against the wall with the other.  My tight Achilles are not ready for stairs yet, and I have to rely on my upper body to descend without putting weight on my feet.

Okay, little fucker stomach, what do you want to eat….?  The yellow light from the fridge is blinding, and I squint to see its contents.  How ’bout some fuckin’ Cheerios?  Cursing makes me feel better.  It deflects blame.

Oh, don’t worry, the blame will come later.  Why didn’t I shove more food down my throat before going to bed?  As if a tall glass of whole milk and a couple handfuls of almonds was possibly enough snack to get through the night.  I should have had Cheerios…and a snausage…and a yogurt….and my monkey chips. And prophylactic Z-quil.

But at this very moment I’m still too tired to start going down the blame game.  I barely have the energy to pour a bowl of cereal.  I’m too tired to sit up on the couch, so I slouch at an angle somewhere between prone and seated, like a rag doll, and dole spoonfuls of milky oats.  My esophagus would rather I sit up like a big girl.  It hurts to swallow food at this angle.  But I’m too tired to care.

The second stage of starvation is called Wishful Thinking.  It’s the part where I think, Okay, the Beast is Fed!  Back to Bed!  As I crawl back up the steps and under the warm covers, my belly purrs with contentment over the crunchy oats and creamy milk.

It lasts for about five minutes.  Starvation is different from hunger.  Hunger can be satisfied.  Starvation is in your bones.  The cereal bowl was enough to get me to stop sweating.  But it feels like a very hungry badger has taken residence inside my gut and is ransacking my organs in search of some tasty bites.

I look at the clock.  It’s now 3am, too late to take any sleeping pills.  It’s going to be a very long night for me and the Badger.

Wait a minute.  It did not take you an hour to roll down the stairs and nosh on some cereal.

Oh, but it did.  It would only take 10 minutes max in day time.  But when you’re sleepwalking the simplest tasks get drawn out by an multitude of at least four.  My Cheerios get so soggy, no one who wasn’t starving would eat them.

The Wishful Thinking stage eventually gives way to the third stage called I Would Like To Die Now.  This is the stage where you are so hungry and tired that tears start to stream down your cheeks.  Your body seems to have come full circle in its secretions, from sweat to tears.  As if I could somehow push this rabid badger out of my kitchen with a waterfall of fluids.

Eventually I don’t feel tired anymore, and I just feel hunger, boredom, and throbbing.  I can still tell I’m tired because my thoughts get all mangled.  The story lines I make up in my head start to fray and not make sense.  The delirium is the closest I get to knowing what it feels like to be mad.

One benefit of not feeling tired is it’s way easier to make trips to the kitchen now.  I feast.

I lay some towels down in the bathroom floor and lie there, giggling at the recollection of how much Aaron hates my stinky snausages.  One time the odor was so overpowering that it woke him up.  This time I close the door to contain the fumes.

The knowledge that the throbbing in my legs is going to make for a pretty painful WUS the next day is the opposite of soothing.

But dawn light is coming in.  Just making it through another night feels like a victory.  Tomorrow before bed I’ll try to shove down more food and pills.

There is a long term plan.  I’ve enlisted in the Baltimore Aging Study, and next month I’ll go to Hopkins for some serious diagnostics.  My physicals never detect anything abnormal — fine thyroid, hormones, glucose, iron, etc.  But there is something queer about my physiology, and maybe three consecutive rigorous days of testing will uncover it.