Outrunning the Hurricane

That's probably a bit over-dramatic, but it is technically true.  Saturday morning, as usual, our training program met for our weekly long runs.  What seemed like ideal conditions (cloudy and 70) was not quite as advertised as it appeared on my phone at 5 am before I stepped outside.  It turns out that when an impending hurricane is only a couple of hours away from hitting, the humidity levels tend to be pretty high.  Shocker, huh?  Well, suffice it to say, within steps of running, everyone was soaked.  Luckily, I brought my trusty hydration vest with me, knowing that I'd at least be out there for a fair amount of time to warrant bringing along hydration. The thing works like a charm, but that's a post for another day.

I ended up running for just over an hour (yahoo!!!), which got me 7+ miles and a new time/distance record since the injury.  This week has been a bit more normal feeling from a training standpoint, because my stats are somewhere in the realm of "normal" for me.  I ended up with 5 runs and about 28 miles, which is the most I've put up since marathon training (albeit at slower paces now).  Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

But back to my point of the post - we had a number of marathon runners who were going 16-20 miles this week and the big question mark on the day was whether or not they'd be able to get in the miles before the storm hit.  I'm proud to say that despite the 100% humidity, which forced several runners to stop at 7-11s to pick up extra hydration in addition to what they already brought, everyone made it back safely before the rain started.  And just as I was pulling away from the store, thus began the next 24 hours of constant rain, wind, and nastiness.

Though it wasn't from the rain, we all returned from our runs (no matter the distance) looking like we had just ran through a hurricane.  I'm pretty sure everyone spent Saturday evening by kicking back with a cold glass of some type of beverage and their legs elevated while the storm did its thing, knowing that the hardest part was over...all they had to do for the rest of the weekend is wait out a hurricane...what's a hurricane when you've logged 20 miles anyways....