a bit before 9am

Saturday morning I woke up at 4:45am.  Who wakes up at 4:45am? crazy people.  I was supposed to leave my house by 5:45am, and I needed to give myself time to be more awake than sleepy when I actually left.  It was our benchmark run, and I was anything but ready.  I'd been hydrating all week, and my month long sobriety has certainly been helping.  My feet, on the other hand, are a mess.  Friday night I went to bed early, and just like last week, I woke up petrified.  I mean, seriously, if I couldn't make it - how the hell do I get back?  Once you leave, once you commit to a certain direction, don't you HAVE to finish?  I mean, you'd have to at least WALK back right.  Or curl up on the sidewalk for a bit.  I admit to having visions of me needing to do the latter.  But I got up, ate a banana and some toast, and got my gear on. I met up with my running group at 6:00, and we did some stretches, went over our route and we were off by 6:15am.

When we started it was pitch-dark, and as we hit the woods in the trail around Town Lake I couldn't see shit. There are many twists, turns, embankments and bridges along the trail, and several times I nearly wiped out. We must have spent the first 3 miles in this heavily wooded area and, in support of my general life philosophy, things just don't seem to count in the dark because I barely felt a thing. It was pretty cold, I was running in a long sleeved shirt for the first time ever, and my legs were freezing. Nothing like the 95+ temps I had learned to tolerate during my early morning runs this summer.

Our route took us all over the city, and up and down and up and down many torturous hills. At about Enfield crossing Mopac someone stopped to wonder how far we'd gone. My own guesstimation was about 5 miles at that point. The actual answer, a little over 7. Sweet baby Jesus, I love it when we're actually ahead of how I feel. This was going alright. Mile 9 was our second water stop, and perhaps we were stopped for too long, I had trouble getting going again. Around mile 10 I realized I was suffering from the same toe ailment I contracted last week, only this time in the homologous toe. And I won't lie, it hurt. Like hell.

As we ran down Congress, the LiveStrong 5k was just finishing up. As I was considering what would happen if I removed my toes right then and there, the last walkers of the 5K entered the finish area. One of them was a small boy, maybe 11 years old, using a walker, and obviously suffering from some profound physical disabilities. It was just the kick in the pants I needed to stop my own complaining, as a little toe pain is probably not that difficult to deal with. By the time I got back to TxDOT I was just happy to be done. It was a bit before 9am, and a bit warmer than when we started.

I can't say enough about the group of 8 women that I ran with. Even though at first we started off too slow, and made a bathroom break at about 1 mile, it was really their supportiveness that got me to the end in mostly one piece.  Miles 9, 10 and 11 were a big struggle for me, but they didn't let me curl up on the sidewalk and die like I would have wanted.  After I got home, the post-run pains started to set in, and I was mostly a mess for the rest of the day. I'm likely down two toenails, I have a blister, and a few other complications (that I hope will be prevented by something new I'll try next time).  But in the end, it was much better than I had feared.

Two more runs left, shorter than this, and then San Antonio with 29,999 other participants. I'm starting to think I might be able to do this.