A Tale of Two Surfaces

I tried to run this morning, but was felled (okay, not exactly felled; maybe just really frustrated) by a borderline case of heat exhaustion. I set out from my parents' house at an easy pace and immediately felt... not right. I was hoping for a minimum of 12 miles, but ended up with 8.5 and spent some time sprawled in the front yard cursing the heat, humidity, and general unpleasantness of the atmosphere. When I got up from my self-pitying sprawl, I was light-headed and sick to my stomach; my face felt hot and my skin felt tingly. I had heat exhaustion several times in high school (like the time we raced the 3200 at 5pm when it was 104 degrees), and I knew I was on the verge of being sick. I cooled down inside for a while--thanks very much to presence of my parents, which meant I didn't have to go right into kid-duty after the run. Now, half a day later, I still feel "off." It's going to be a long summer...

I was thinking today (during the aforementioned sprawl) about why my running is so awful right now. I'm doing half as many miles as I was in California, at a slower pace, and still having a hard time. Part of it is the temperature and humidity, I know. And I did admittedly lose fitness during the months preceding the move, when our house was on the market and husband was working on the weekends. But I shouldn't feel this bad, every day. (And, no, I'm not pregnant again.) But I think that these factors are compounded by the fact that I'm running on hard surfaces. In CA, I ran on trails 100% of the time (either dirt roads or singletrack); here, I'm running on hard surfaces 95% of the time. I was relatively free of debilitating injuries for a long stretch of time before we moved, and I always felt sufficiently recovered, even after 20+ miles every weekend in the hills. Here, I'm doing my weekday runs through our neighborhood, in the early morning dark. It's really my only option, for a number of reasons. On the weekend, I try to incorporate a few of the nearby trails, but they only amount to 2-4 miles and are extremely technical--nothing like the rolling dirt paradise of the East Bay Regional Parklands. There are some other trail options in San Antonio, but they require a fair amount of driving for not a lot of trail (Bandera excepted, but that's not a realistic weekend destination for me, especially on my own). I miss the daily soft-surface security of the creek trail, where I could push the stroller for miles on dirt and gravel.

Anyway, I don't think I'm recovering well from one run to the next, and my body isn't happy with the pounding, especially when the pounding occurs at a heat index above 90 (or 100) degrees. I'm sure I'll acclimate. But for now, it's frustrating. I've realized that there's no way I can train this summer for an ultra. Maybe I should just get pregnant and hold out for a long race in the winter of 2011? ;)

Note: The post above makes me sound all doom-and-gloom about Texas. Really, running is the only thing that sucks about our move. Everything else--proximity to parents, nice house in a nice neighborhood, kid-friendliness, husband's career--is firmly in the "pro" column.

Racing for Corn

The kids and I are visiting my parents this weekend (while husband negotiates an insane work project), and--as is my habit--I looked for a nearby race to capitalize on the free babysitting. A quick perusal of the race calendar revealed a 5k associated with a local Corn Festival. Sure, why not. It's in a town even smaller than my hometown, a twenty minute drive down a country highway. I parked on the edge of a field, not far from a tent offering "Pork and Beans BBQ"; oddly enough, their wares actually smelled pretty good to me, even at 7:30 in the morning. I quickly signed up (cheap! only $20, with a shirt!) and ran an easy warm-up while sizing up the competition. I saw quite a few women wearing fancy technical outfits and racing flats, which surprised me. (As usual, I was wearing my dusty Kayano clunkers and a bra top purchased from Target in the pre-baby era.) I've noticed that runners in Texas wear a lot fancier gear than runners in California, even though folks here are, as a whole, substantially slower. Maybe it's because triathlons (notoriously gear-obsessed) are more popular here? Anyway, I figured some of the flat-wearing, shimmel-sporting women would be fast.

I only had time for a mile of warm-up and was already soaking with sweat when I lined up at the start. I'm not exactly acclimated to the heat and humidity here, yet. My expectations were low, especially given the flare up of recurring pelvic/groin pain this week. Not to mention that most of my (relatively meager) mileage recently has been at 9-minute mile pace. I looked at my watch sometime during the first mile and saw 6:55 pace. I knew that was probably too quick for my current fitness, so I tried to loosen up a little. The miles passed by quickly. After several years of running long, slow trail races, 5ks seem to fly by now. It's an odd sensation. I'm so accustomed to the mental game of dividing up the miles in a 50k, that the 5k is almost too fleeting a distance to parse. It was an out-and-back course, so I saw at the turn-around that I was the third woman. Numbers one and two were too far ahead of me to attempt to catch, and I was comfortably in front of four. I decided to cruise in and not exacerbate the growing pain in my groin. My watch said 22:23 at the finish--not good, certainly; but not too bad given my training and the conditions. I used to run 5ks in 20-ish minutes (give or take 30 seconds), so 22 minutes still feels slow. But it also simultaneously feels fast, since I very rarely approach that pace in training anymore.

I placed 3rd OA, and 1st in my age group--not exactly a speedy feat, given the competition. I managed a mile of aimless cool-down before succumbing to the heat and decided to wait (for what turned out to be a long time) for the awards. I got a corn trophy, which I quickly photographed as Facebook fodder for my friends in CA.

Ideally I'd do a long run--or, at least, what constitutes a "long" run for me these days--tomorrow, but I'm not sure about my groin issues. I generally end up running through them and they go away eventually, but maybe a day or two of rest would hurry up the evanescence of pain?