Love Hangover

You can put two maraschino cherries and as much grenadine in a giant gin and tonic as you want… and it still won’t make drinking two of them (along with half a bottle of wine earlier in the evening) a good idea for the night before your long run. Didn’t seem like such a bad idea at the time, but when I woke up Sunday morning with that familiar sweaters-on-my-teeth feeling, I realized it probably wasn’t the smartest of moves. Amy was due over at 8:30 for a jaunt through the Tinicum figure 8… except she didn’t want to do the interesting part of the loop since she had an allergic reaction to some of the brush we encountered the last time we ran there together (and I won’t even go there with the jokes related to my last pass through that section… something akin to how we’re not into that kind of bush…there are a million possibilities.). So we did the boring part twice along with the upper loop – making more of a figure 9, I suppose.

I started out feeling fairly strong, much to my surprise given how I felt when I popped those two Advil about an hour and a half earlier. Amy was having a bit of trouble with her calf muscles not communicating or cooperating well with the rest of her body. We decided to split once we reached the bottom of the upper loop. She ran the outside part and I ran the inside, hugging the shoreline of the lake. The idea was to meet up and then double back along the outside of the loop. The section of the loop that I took – the one that passes Make Out Tower – has little shade. It wasn’t long before the blazing sun, the heat, and the breeze reminded me that there was water, water everywhere… but not a drop to drink.

By the time I caught up with Amy – about a half mile past the parking lot at the top of the loop – I felt not so good. I was thankful for the shade of this side of the trail. Soon it became one of those runs where you start making bargains with yourself. “Okay, just make it up and around the next bend and if you still feel like s***, you can walk for a minute.” But really, you just tell yourself that to keep you running because as soon as you round that next bend, you’re already renegotiating the terms of the deal. That was pretty much how it went for the rest of the run – making deals with myself to keep the forward momentum. And then we reached the boring part again. Another long stretch with no shade. Life was sucking a lot. I did, at one point, stop to walk for a little while. Why do I feel such defeat admitting this? Absurd. As Amy said, “If every run felt like this, I wouldn’t run.” Amen sister. Eventually we finished and were glad for that.

Waiting for us back at Casa de Reba (formerly known as Camp Seeba) was a deliciously sweet and cool mini watermelon. I don’t know why – but watermelon really is that much cuter when it’s mini. I sliced it up in short order for us to enjoy as we stretched and cooled down.

I don't have time to G-map this route. All I can say is that it was a very long 75 minutes of running.