It's been an interesting week of training so far. On Monday I was up at 5:40 in the morning to get in a fartlek workout before heading off on Trekkers. This is a camp where we leave in canoes on Monday with tents, food, clothing, etc, and come back on Thursday. We go canoeing around the lake, camping on the shoreline wherever we want, and cooking meals over a fire. The kids had a great time! The act of canoeing for hours under the summer sun every day is taxing enough, but then stopping somewhere without a public access road makes running almost impossible. I was fortunate to only have to take one day off this week, but my runs were exhausting, even at an easy pace. I wasn't eating the best food and I definitely wasn't getting enough sleep. Then today happened.
This morning was my long run. Luckily enough, a friend of mine from Bismarck who has a lake cabin near the camp was there to run with me. His name is Elliot Stone and he just came off of a stellar senior season at Shiloh Christian where he broke the State Class B records in the 1600 and 3200, and now he is training for his freshman year at NDSU. I enjoy running with him because he has a great laid-back personality to compromise a calculated attentiveness to training.
I stepped out of my cabin at 6:55am and was greeted by a strong gust of cool wind. We have been drowning in humidity for the past couple of weeks, but the weather has changed. Today a west wind gusting in the mid-to-upper 30s kept everything nice and cool. I had a 13-mile easy run scheduled and he had a 13-mile progressive on his sheet (a progressive run is where each mile is faster than the one before it, so you progressively increase the pace). The first half of the run was awesome, but we had the wind either at our back or at our side. Recall that on the gravel roads to the camp, there is only one road coming in, so every run becomes an out-and-back, so we had to turn around and come back. In the last five miles, we had a two mile stretch continuously into the wind and a decent uphill at the end of it, followed by a downhill mile with the wind at our side, then another uphill into the wind mile, and then we ended with a last mile where the wind was at our side again.
I have no idea what our paces were in the last half of the run, because I was just trying to survive. We eventually shed the idea of trying to hit faster paces, choosing instead for an easy pace, and focused on fighting the wind and trying to traverse the North Dakota countryside. Our conversation quickly faded, for we couldn't hear each other without yelling. We had to check behind us often, because we were running in the middle of the road and had no way of hearing a car or pickup coming behind us. We were grateful for the rain this week, because if not we would have had gravel and dust thrown constantly into our eyes.
I can hold my own against wind. I've been running long enough in North Dakota to know to slowly grind away into the wind and to not get angry or upset at it. Hills, however, are still my enemy due to the fact that my Red River Valley legs haven't studied up on changes in topography much. I quickly and often fell behind Elliot while running up the hills into the wind. I would look ahead and pinpoint exactly where I would give up and ask to stop for a rest. Every gust of wind punched me in the face, but more importantly in the legs and almost took away my resolve to keep picking them up. The wind masked the fact that I was starting to wheeze. My legs were turning to lead and becoming impossible to pick up. Honestly, the fact that Elliot was continuing to push kept me going, and I did everything I could to not stop and instead kept close to him.
We got to the end of the two mile stretch into the wind and turned the corner for our downhill mile with the wind at our side. My breathing was heavy and my legs were slow. I looked at him and coughed out "how are you doing?" "I'm fine" he says "that wind is kind of tough isn't it?" Elliot is from Bismarck, and Bismarck is a hilly place, so he handles hills like a boss. I couldn't see it, but I'm pretty sure he tied a rope around both of our waists and drug me up a few of those hills today. My supposed 'easy' run turned into a battle against mother nature, and as anybody from North Dakota knows, mother nature doesn't like to lose. In fact, she really never does. But we can extract our revenge by conquering the elements little by little. I am now stronger today for finishing this, and that's what's important.
This next week I'll be in Bismarck doing day camps (vacation Bible school), and I know I'll have to be ready for the hills. Hopefully it isn't too windy; I have some easy runs scheduled!
Have a Great Weekend!
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