Boy am I dumb. Running 50 miles in Leadville is a piece of cake? Hardly.
I finished. But it hurt like hell.
Had a couple of learning opportunities during the race, which caused a great deal of pain. The course went up to 12,000+ feet at least 6 times. At that elevation I felt light-headed, disoriented, and extremely tired. Then I would feel better after descending. Then I would feel pretty bad again at the top. I haven't had the occasion to train on big mountains, so the descents really tore up my legs. At 25 miles I felt a bit haggard. Then I ate a meatloaf sandwich that my mom made. Took a couple hours to get into my system, but for a while after that I was a new man. Could've been any number of things, but I prefer to think it was the meatloaf. Yum. Then with about 2 miles to go, I started to feel really sick. Had to fight back the urge to puke. And running was out of the question, so I walked the rest of the way in. Turns out I had a touch of pulmonary edema. When I got back to the condo I got extreme chills, fever, fluid in my lungs. All the good stuff that comes with altitude sickness. I've had it before, on more than one occasion. So I spent a restless night trying to sleep it off.
Today I feel better, but my legs are in the midst of responding from extreme training stimulus. Know what I mean? Probably not, but it's hard to walk.
Hopefully the rest of the week will include some productive training time.
Oh, final time was somewhere around 13:20.
2 comments:
Well it's nice to see a few other comments on this blog so I don't feel like such a creepy stalker like I do on the Duathlon blog.
Take care of yourself Brian.
You talked about life getting in the way and growing up with my mom and dad having a family business I understand that owning a business makes the whole life getting in the way is a 10 fold problem.
The post from July 19th really hit home for me. I've had some pretty nasty things happen to me in my life and it really gives you a measuring stick to compare to problems when they pop up.
I've found that too many people complain and cry about minor problems because they've never had a real problem in their whole life.
Good luck.
Jim Glover
Thanks Jim.
Things are fine. Most of the "problems" now are in my head, they're lack of sleep, they're too much to do. They add up to stress and a tight neck that makes my jaw hurt. But luckily, as I was telling my crew last night, I perform better under adversity. I'm not sure why, but the more things that are going wrong, the more pressure that is on me, the more pissed off about life I am, the better I tend to do. So bring it on. It makes me want to finish despite things going my way. At some point I say, screw it, everything in the whole world can go against me, but it can't make me stop running. I'll run until I decide to stop. Until I decide to stop. That's why I love running.
This race is going to hurt like hell.
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