Mental Toughness

It's been 3 days since our last long run and I finally feel I can blog about it.  Wow.  Talk about training for the mind.  Despite our AMAZING winter (or lack of it) and really early spring here on Vancouver Island, not all runs can produce picturesque postcard Go-Pro pictures worthy of travel magazine or real estate insert covers.  Last week reminded us that running on the island often involves getting wet.  And cold.  And muddy.  And repeat.

Backing up, for the last 2 weeks our family has been fighting all manner of flu and cold bugs. My kids seem to have brought EVERYTHING home from school in 2 or 3 variations this month.  I have been doggedly determined not to get sick.  I've taken my vitamins, oil of oregano, gotten extra sleep by going to bed super early (to make up for being woken in the middle of the night by sick kids), washed my hands repeatedly, even done acupuncture on myself 2x/day, all to boost my immune system to fight those nasty bugs. Going into our 2nd-to-last long run week, I knew I needed to log the miles cause there is no time left.  I managed to get 30K in on Thurs by running 2x that day - all without getting really wet, and got to bed really early.

2 hours in and still smiling

Friday I woke up to wind and light rain.  Sarah and I met in the parking lot at the trailhead at 0600.  Not many words were spoken, we just switched on our headlamps and took off trotting up Queso Grande.  First mental note of the day: my headlamp is sufficient for night road running, but NOT night trail running.  Must get new headlamp before Miwok.  It was a slow first 1.5 hours in the dark up the mountain, but the sky started lightening as we summited Upper Queso and I could relax and stop prancing like an idiot to avoid tripping in the dark.  So much for energy conservation.

Blurry pictures as reflective of how much moisture covered EVERYTHING in my pack.

The rest of the run was a blur of getting wet, wetter, cold and colder.  We looped back to the cars after 3 hours to change socks, grab hot miso soup, restock water and fuel, and say hello to a hard core friend who showed up with her baby snuggly tucked into the jogging stroller to start her own run amidst the downpour.  Ok, maybe it was a drizzle at that point, but I was wet and miserable.

Puddles and mud

At the 5 hour mark, I wasn't doing so well.  We were very high up, the wind was cold, the mist was deeply penetrating into my bones.  I was tired.  I was cold. Mentally, I was DONE.  All I could think about was, "what is the fastest way out of here?"  If it wasn't for the fact that I really needed Sarah to guide me out of where we were, I would have bailed on her.  Whoops - did I say that?  She kept me going, even though all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and sleep in a puddle.  I am NOT kidding. But lesson learned again...

If you just keep going, it gets better.  After a lovely Oskri Pineapple Coconut bar snack, and descending to an altitude that brought the temp up maybe 2 degrees, I felt revived!  I was Chatty Cathy as we picked our way down the mountain, while Sarah was having her own issues with seriously cold body temps.  I bored her with a long narrative summary of my latest audiobook (Running with the Kenyans) to keep her sufficiently annoyed enough to stay ahead of me lol!

My shoes are still holding up!  I wore through 1 pair of socks today though.  Completely shredded.

When we finally made it back to our cars (total time 6 hours), we made a beeline for Sarah's backyard cedar woodfired sauna to stretch and restore our core body temps.  What a treat.  We didn't log the miles we'd hoped for during that run, but the energy expenditure in keeping warm and dodging puddles alone must have counted for 10 extra kilometres.

Miwok, please bring me warm sunshine and shoes that aren't weighed down by water and mud.  But if you don't, my mind is now tougher.