Close enough

Does one's body ever become accustomed to running without the accompanying aches and pains? That's a rhetorical question. I think.

Easter was lovely. Mr. Shrinking Knitter and I took his mother to church and out to dinner, stopped by the grocery for crudité supplies, stopped to visit a sick friend in the hospital and made it home shortly after CBS began its afternoon telecast of the Masters.

My plan to run in the afternoon, thus forcing myself to eat lightly, worked quite well. I had a teensy slice of lamb, a portion of baked salmon, a scoop of mixed vegetables [broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, etc.] and sampled several salads from the buffet. All of it had settled enough that I could begin the long run shortly after we got home.

If you'll recall, our heroine was going to run an out-and-back loop to the entrance of a church camp located 6.3 miles from her driveway.

The last three miles is virgin territory. I may have driven on it at one time or another, but I've never walked or run there. The first half-mile was pretty flat, giving me lots of hope. I then encountered a slight upward slope, nothing I couldn't handle. And then the terrain just went up and up and up until I encountered a sign indicating that the church camp was one mile to the south. And it was one of the steepest downhill roads I've seen in all the time I've lived here in the Middle of Nowhere.

I quickly calculated that 10.6 miles is pretty close to 11, which is what my long run was supposed to be this week, so I turned around and scampered back down that long stretch. Because I had to walk so much of it, my time was abysmal – two hours and 25 minutes – but it's done! And no one is happier about it than I. [To be fair to our heroine, hills are not usually a part of her training runs. So 2:25 on hills isn't totally abysmal, just slightly.]

[In fact, I had a bit of trouble settling down after I got back home, and Mr. Shrinking Knitter said I was acting kind of 'high.' I'm not sure if it was endorphins or relief that I didn't break a limb completing the exercise!]

I took an Aleve before I started the run, another before bed and still woke up in pain about 1 a.m. I read many blogs in the middle of the night, but was too tired to comment. Apologies! I finally got a few more hours' sleep and then woke up at 7:30 a.m.-ish, not quite rarin' to go, but better than last night.

This week I do three four-mile runs, one eight-mile run and another 11-mile run. I will definitely be out searching for a six-mile stretch of flat road before next weekend. The next time I see the hill I climbed yesterday will be from a car window. Now I know why West Virginia is called the Mountain State.

Nineteen days until race day.