Half marathon training, or how I ended up running 7 miles in a mini-skirt

Ten days from now I'm doing my half marathon for Clinica. My start time is 5:30 in the morning so if all goes well I'll be done around 8am and I'll have the whole rest of the day ahead of me. Crazy way to start a day! There are four of us doing the half, and a couple others doing the 5K, and between all of us we're hoping to cover Clinica's rent for the year. We're doing pretty well, having raised $2275 between all of us -- we need another $2000 to meet our goal.

If anyone has been meaning to make a donation, there is still time to do so using this webform.

I wanted to write a post about all the fun, exciting, crazy, and sometimes painful adventures this training process has brought. So here they go:

Brady passed out on the floor after one of our runs

#1: Scrubbing my dog Brady down with dishsoap. While home in Stoughton, WI, I went on a few training runs with my mom's dog Brady, who is a great companion but loves swimming too much for his own good. We can never take him off the lease because everytime we have, he chases rabbits, ducks, and geese for miles before we can track him down again. We were running on a floating pedestrian bridge over a little river when Brady up and jumped over the side, happily swimming alongside the bridge on his lease all the way to the other side. "River" might have been a generous term for the swampy water we were crossing, so when we got home I knew Brady needed a serious scrub down before coming in the house. After a bunch of hose water and some dishsoap, he was good to go.

A Google Streetview shot of Broadway Terrace

#2: Leaping off the road into landscape shrubs. Today I thought it would be fun to investigate Robert Sibley Volcanic Regional Park, only 3 miles away from my house as the crow flies, and the nearest point to me of the epic Bay Area Ridge Trail. Unfortunately, as the roads go, the way from my house to Sibley Park involves going through crazy switchbacks up on a road called Broadway Terrace through a very affluent neighborhood. I did my best to always run on the side with the best visibility and move off to the side anytime I heard a car coming, but a couple of times I ended up flinging myself into the landscape shrubbery in front of a house as a car came around a blind corner. I'm never running on that road again.

Grizzly Peak Boulevard (from Google Street View)

#3: Going over instead of under the Berkeley Hills. To avoid running back on Broadway Terrace today, I took Grizzly Peak Boulevard, which is a well-established bike route and much more pleasant to run on. It also took me directly over Hwy 24 as it enters the Caldecott Tunnel, which I will be traveling through twice a day every day to get to work (and not so infrequently waiting in a long line of cars to enter). Only we were so high above it and the day was so foggy, I didn't even realize we had already passed the tunnels until way too late. I'll have to come back another day to get a bird's eye view of these Tunnels that will be such a part of my life for the next 3 years.

My running route from today

#4: Surprise, going 11 miles! As a result of #2 and #3, my little jaunt to check out the park that is 3 miles away form my house turned into an eleven mile run. I walked bits of it due to steep hills, scary blind corners, and a few side stitches, but I ran the vast majority of it and it makes me much more confident that I will indeed be able to do these 13 miles ten days from now.

#5: Running 7 miles in a mini-skirt. On my last day in Madison, I knew I'd have a few hours downtime in the city so I packed my running stuff -- my "toe shoes" that I run in, sports bra, shirt, waterbottle, even a backpack to put all my other stuff in and have my brother watch it for me. I was all prepared -- except I forgot to take my shorts out of the drier. I wasn't about to let those hours go to waste, so I thought desparately about creative solutions - running in my underwear (its just like a swimsuit bottom, right? no one would care in madison), or in my jeans (not the most comfortable and they'd be super sweaty afterwards, but better than not running). In the end I realized I had a second shirt with me, a plain black tank top, so I put it on like a skirt and went on my run. I'm sure I was getting funny looks, but I got my run in!

#6 Running in Zion National Park at Altitude. I only got to do one run while hanging out with my family in Utah (after the first one I came down with cold) but it was pretty spectacular -- running on a dirt trail along the Virgin River through Zion National Park. Here is a picture of the river and trail from someone else's trip there. So beautiful and solitary, mostly I just startled mule deer out of their slumbers.

And a couple last photos to share, that have nothing to do with running, except that doing this painting has made me see the trees and their trunks, branches, leaves, and how the light hits them so much more intensively when I am out running. They are of the mural of a birch grove my mom and I painted during the six days I was home with her in Stoughton.