Crappy running

I haven't been able to think of any chirpy, upbeat topics to post about over the last couple of days. Running is my stress reliever, but even that hasn't been a magic elixir lately. The last week was really rough in many ways, professionally and personally. Then it was suddenly Saturday morning and I'm facing a 10-mile run. My half marathon is four weeks from yesterday, so no blowing off the double-digit mileage runs right now!

It was in the 40s with wind gusts of up to 35 mph when I started off with a friend at 7 a.m. on Saturday, great temps but that wind off of lake Michigan was bah-rutal. The whitecaps were gorgeous and angry and vibrant, but the steel gray sky certainly matched mood. We ran south five miles with the wind to our back, which was fine, but heading back north was a dogfight! (We start so far north on the lakefront, it always just kind of works out that way). At one point a wind gust hit us so hard I actually fell into my running partner. Oops! He nearly had to drag me to finish that run, period. (Thanks, Vern!) I wanted to quit before the halfway point, and several times fantasized about taking a cab home on the blustery trek north toward my car. I've run a ton of 10-milers, and this had to have been one of the worst.

My little ol' poetic side saw the parallel, of course, between the run and the week I'd just had. The moral of the story, at least what I'm taking away from it, is that sometimes you just gotta slog through whatever it is that you're dealing with, no matter how thick and mucky it is. And know that it will get better.

Indeed, I got done with the run from hell and went home, I ate a huge breakfast and played with the toddler man. When he went down for a nap I took what is probably the hardest, deepest nap I've taken for a long time, so much so that I was trying to figure out what day it was when I woke. Though the issues I'm wrangling with haven't gone away, I am feeling better, just as my running, though lousy on Saturday, was great this morning -- I ran four brisk miles in (thankfully) windless weather. :-)