Making lemonade

Bottom line on Saturday’s eight-miler: I had a hard and painful time. And I got a lot of good one-on-one coaching.

We ran in Rock Creek Park, from Pierce’s Mill north to Wise Road and back. Four miles each way. That makes eight. Our longest previous run was six.

Northbound was mostly uphill, particularly near the end. Coach Mark had warned us of “a bear of a hill” in the last half mile, but I thought he was playing mind games, overstating the hill’s awfulness so we’d feel great when we reached the top.

Wrong. The hill was a beast, and well before we reached the top, I was hurting. And had four miles left between me and my car. I turned downhill and made it another mile before I had to pull over to the side to stretch and massage my screaming right knee. At least three fellow trainees stopped to see if I was OK. Then I fell in with our mission mentor, Abby Smith, who was doing a walk/run rotation. I stayed with that for a while, then fell behind again, feeling like my right leg might fall off at any moment.

A couple of minutes later Coach Josh jogged up in the opposite direction, turned, and fell in beside me. “Did Abby send you to check on me?” I asked, and he replied, “Absolutely. So how are things?”

Well, let’s see…Not particularly winded. Heart rate OK. Left leg doing great. Right leg hurts from ankle to hip. Josh then convened a five minute clinic on everything from running down the road’s center line (the only level spot) to getting some new shoes with more stability and motion control. Pronating like crazy, aggravated by the skewed road surface. Plus, get serious about hydrating – you should have emptied that bottle twice already – walk in from here – ice the parts that hurt – take the next two days off – and come back slowly – it’s too early in the program to get hurt.

Somehow, I ended up feeling that there’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed, and come mid-morning on June 5, I’m going to be River-dancing across that finish line. Maybe, if I can just address this one specific problem, I’ll have a breakthrough.

At a minimum, I expect a placebo effect from the new shoes…which will be welcome, because there are lines still lurking on our training schedule that say “12 miles” and “13 miles.” Remember, http://pages.teamintraining.org/nca/zooma11/jmckeonymw to donate.

OUR SUMMER MARATHON/HALF MARATHON TEAM HAS RAISED $120K SO FAR!!