Second: If you're religious, I need prayers. If you're not, send karma. I now live with two teenaged girls.
Hurricane Dora has sent some thick cloud cover to my neighborhood, enough to make the sun shy this morning. I got up at a quarter to five to find it totally dark outside. Last night, I fell asleep imagining how I would take my time and carefully monitor my injured leg as I went on a short, but quite hilly run this morning. When I woke, my leg was stiff and wouldn't loosen. I ditched the planned run in favor of an easier, but slightly longer route; a four mile out and back with just one smaller hill.
I hit the road by 5 am and trusted myself enough to bring my stopwatch. I couldn't see a thing and briefly considered returning indoors to stumble around the bedroom while I looked for my headlamp. I figured I'd bothered my wife enough looking for my right shoe already and it would be light soon enough.
The first intersection is 3/4 of a mile down the road and it's a drop of about 200 feet in elevation. I did a great job of running under control, very slow...painfully slow. Well, actually pain-free slow. As I ran I thought about a lot of things, I got in my own head. That's what I missed most about running.
I completed the 4 miles in just under 42 minutes. My leg was tight on the last 3/4's of a mile, but my vigilance hopefully prevented too much damage. It wasn't quite a workout, but it was nice to run.
But now that I'm cooled off, stretched and iced, the injured leg is quite painful and tight. My gait is slightly impaired, but I don't think it's a set back. I'm thinking that my next run will be a short 2 or 3 mile run on a treadmill on Monday. Tomorrow I'll have a clear idea of what's going on with the leg.
In the meantime, I will take the recovery VERY slowly. Even after I'm pain free, I'll limit running to 3 days a week for the first two pain free weeks. I'll probably not resume where I left off until September. But hey, that's alright. I'll ride my bike for cardio and continue to strengthen and improve flexibility in the meantime.
When I do come back, I'll be stronger than before because of the experience.
Today I rode my motorcycle to Tucson for a small job regarding math curriculum with ASU. The start time was 8 am and the ride up was AWESOME. We were done by noon and I ate some sushi for lunch...mmmm.
I needed to pick up a few things for my bicycle ride tomorrow, so I had to drive my motorcycle through town. Remember, it's Tucson and it's July. While it's cloudy at my home 60 miles south, it's substantially hotter in Tucson even when it's NOT cloudy at my home.
The bike idled at a red light. Red lights must have been a theme. One light liked me so much, it turned red again after I waited through the first cycle. Red lights and sweat.
Heat. My feet, through my boots, could feel the asphalt's heat. I thought about how bad it would be to wreck, how much worse it would be to lay in a heap on that hot asphalt.
The 100 cubic inch air cooled v-twin thumped. Each thump sent a wave of heat rising from below toasted my legs and torso. While the sun had been shy in the morning at home, she was angry at me here.
I'm rehearsing my route as I bake at the red light. When's that turkey thermometer going to pop off? I'm going to get some new water bottles and maybe some shorts if the sales are good. I'm riding my bicycle from my home to a town twenty miles north of Tucson tomorrow... I've got a degree in math. That means I should be able to figure out a lot of problems other people can't solve. And yet...wait, is this some sort of autism? Am I crazy? October is nice!
At that moment, I notice a runner with a white t-shirt draped over his head taking slow strides. Hallucination? If so, they're multiplying. On the other side of the street a woman is running. This is madness. Then I see, farther down the street, another man running. He was moving his arms in a strange fashion like swatting at bugs, though I doubt any where there at the time. Tucson, by the way, has the most psychologically unstable bums on the planet. Apparently, its runners are following suit. Well, when in Rome...or when in Tucson, exercise in the heat.
The ride is on for tomorrow. I'm excited and nervous. It's been a while since I've ridden that far and I've never done a ride like this...one direction. It's going to be great.
Today's picture:
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