Pretzel Hangover

My weekend runs are getting longer, and on Sunday I had to do 15 miles. Doable. Unfortunately, I spent all day Saturday at Disneyland. Left my home at 6:30am, didn't get back until after 1am. The long day of hiking around the park wasn't so bad, but around 10:00 I was getting a little hungry. I was going to get a small bag of Mickey Mouse pretzels, but then I figured I'd get a large bag to share.

Well, I did share a couple of pretzels. But not many. The rest I ate. And ate. And ate. I ate them in the park. I ate them on the ride home. I ate them after I got home.

Needless to say, I wasn't feeling too well when I woke up. In fact I was pretty sick. But I forced myself outside and did a late run, starting at 11:00am. Got up to about 85 degrees. The first 9 miles or so went OK, but then all those pretzels started looking for attention. I was getting rumblies in my tummy and did not think I would be able to finish the run.

I decided I would go to the nearest bathroom in Griffith Park to do some... "purging". There was a bathroom building about a half-mile down the trail so I planned on stopping in there. Now if triathlon has taught me anything, it's that I'll go to the bathroom in any smoldering, stinky port-a-potty or bathroom I can find. But I draw the line with doors: if I need to sit down, I need a door. Well this bathroom had stalls but no doors. And it wasn't even like the stalls were tucked away in the back; they were opposite the sinks. Ain't gonna happen.

Ironman is very much a mental game, and I was thinking to myself that I could very well get sick in Kona and I'll have to just deal with it, so I continued on with the run. I did a little bit of walking to settle my stomach and that helped a lot. The biggest test however was when I made it back to the car. The way I set up my running loops, my car was at mile 12. Which meant I still had 3 miles to go. It's one thing to be stuck out on the trail and you have no choice but to finish a run, but it's another ball game when you are faced with the option of just stepping in your car and calling it a day.

I am proud to say I trudged forward. My stomach was feeling OK for the time being, so I figured I would risk an extra half hour on the trail (although at the pace I was doing, it was a lot slower than that.) It took me 3 hours to do the distance and at this point in my training I really should be much faster than that for this distance. But I got my miles in for the day.

Oh and I went home, got a little sick, then felt a lot better.

Next week I have another 15-mile run to do. I'm expecting/hoping to improve upon this week's time a great deal.