Running with the Night

My training schedule called for me to do a 15 mile run this weekend. Unfortunately, I decided to go skiing in Mammoth this weekend and like a moron figured "I'll just do my run on Monday". Dumb. My awe-inspiring boss is very tolerant about my training habits, but I wasn't about to take time off to take my stroll. So that meant either getting up at 4 a.m. (yeah, right) or doing it at night.

Running at the Rose Bowl around 6 or 7 at night is actually pretty nice. There are lots of families out there pushing babies in strollers, and lots of other joggers creating a great sense of "community". Because you're doing 3-mile laps, you can use your car as a home base for refueling. You can hydrate as much as you want, because there are public restrooms by the soccer field.

Unfortunately, by around 7:30 or so all those wonderful people creating that community were back home watching TV and I still had 3 laps to go. It suddenly became a cold, dark, desolate wasteland. And it seems that those ever-so-helpful restrooms get locked sometime after 7, as I found out the hard way. I scraped up my legs wandering through the dark bushes to make use of Nature's Facilities. And to top it all off, this meant I didn't have dinner until 9:30.

It was a slow run: a pace 3-minutes slower than my half-marathon time and I still was not doing well. Right now my foot is soaking in an ice bucket to control the swelling. This is not a good thing.