Womp Womp (Kaiser Half Week 13 of 13)

The big story of this week was definitely the weather. We've been in the path of an atmospheric river here in the Bay Area this week, with one pretty bad storm Wednesday night and another forecasted for--you guessed it! Sunday morning.

Starting around midweek, the group chat was full of discussions about what to wear based on how conditions shook out and the logistics of getting in a warm-up and cool-down but also not dying of hypothermia.

Then Friday afternoon, we got the news that race organizers were changing the course due to concerns from SF Parks & Rec around the possibility of falling tree branches in the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park. Instead all three distances (5K, 10K, half) would start together & run laps up and down the Great Highway.

Obviously this was disappointing, but falling tree branches in big storms have killed and maimed enough people since I've lived here that I completely understand the decision. (Back at cross country team nationals in December 2022, a big branch fell on the course during the race, prompting race organizers to move the race to the Polo Fields. Having witnessed that I'd definitely like to NOT witness something similar again.)

The thing about running up and down the Great Highway is that it can be awesome (straight and flat) but it is also completely exposed along the coast and so can also be extremely windy. (There is a certain irony that folks pointed out of taking the race out of the Park for safety reasons and instead situating it along the Great Highway where the wind is likely to be the worst, but at least that section of the course is not lined with giant trees.) If it was a calm day, I wouldn't really mind the change but running the Great Highway even in moderate wind is not the most fun, and in these conditions I knew it meant I'd have almost no chance for a fast race. (Plus, the revised course wasn't certified--MapMyRun put it at 13.08--and since I felt like I was in shape to run at least a pretty solid race, that would have been kind of a bummer.)

By Saturday, though, I'd more or less talked myself into just showing up and doing my best, and hey! Another war story to tell! Yes, my training had been good and I'd been excited about a fast race but it's not like I was in the best shape of my life or anything.

I parked about half a mile from the start at around 6:30am, figuring I'd jog to the port-a-potties around seven to get a sense of what the weather was like and what it would feel like on the Great Highway. Just as I was about to leave the car, one of my teammates shared an email they'd just seen that the half was off and all HM runners needed to switch to either the 5K or 10K. It seems kind of silly now but at the time I remember my reaction being, "But I'm not in shape for a 10K! I'm trained to run a half, not 10K! Wow, I really do not want to run a 10K today!"

While I jogged to the port-a-potties, I kept going back and forth about what I wanted to do. Run it as a workout? Run it at half marathon effort? Say fuck it and actually try to run a fast 10K?? (Though that was really not appealing since it was two 5K loops.) Just do the bare minimum and jog the 5K? Or not even bother and just head home? It was clear from the wind that no one would be running very fast today.

By the time I was heading back to the car, I'd pretty much settled on not racing at all and at most just running kind of a tempo effort, and decided to wear a long sleeves instead of the crop I'd previously been planning on. I'd literally just finished switching my bib onto my longsleeves when I got another text saying the race was now outright cancelled. Our teammate who is the race director added that the race tents were becoming unsafe and even doubling the weight holding them down, they just couldn't get them stable. This didn't surprise me given how hard the port-a-potty I used was rocking!

So, again, disappointing, but understandable. There just wasn't any safe way to hold the race given the weather and at some point someone had to make the hard call.

We got a break in the storm around 2pm, so I headed out around then with the goal of getting at least 13 miles, maybe with some fast intervals thrown in, but I felt truly awful once I got going, worse than I've felt running in a long, long time. It reminded me a bit of how I felt last spring and summer, feeling utterly fatigued & like my legs were jello for no good reason, or as if I were running at altitude. Considering I felt like I was barely shuffling along, my pace was pretty normal, but my body felt like trash; picking up the pace, even just a bit, felt impossible, as if I were wearing lead boots. Given all that, I decided doing any more than the bare minimum to get back home was a bad idea, and ended up with 11 miles total for the day.

Out on my terrible run, evidence of the storm and dangerous wind was everywhere. All of the below were quite near the original course, and this is only a few of the downed branches I saw:

The wind started picking up again when I was a little more than halfway back home, and by the time I was just a couple miles away, I was starting to feel actively unsafe amongst all the trees, which gave me a whole new reason not to tack on any extra miles. The last straw was tripping on some debris and rolling my ankle and just barely managing to stay upright. For just a second I thought "SHIT I literally just broke my ankle" but thankfully I was able to walk it out a bit and finish jogging home. Still it did not feel good, so 11 miles it was.

This one (📸 SF Chron) is from the route I took home from the race when it was cancelled -- the road was still clear at that time but apparently later in the day this tree was blown over, blocking all four lanes. 🤯

 ~*~*~ 🎡 🎡 Kaiser Permanente Half Week 13 of 13 🎡 🎡 ~*~*~

Grand Total: 32.92 miles

🐌 Easy: 30 miles
🐎 Fast: 2.92 miles

Perhaps it's just as well that the race was cancelled. I seemed to be recovering nicely for the most part over the week, then woke up Sunday deep in the yellow. Sure enough Sunday's easy consolation run felt like 💩.

Monday 1/29: 2 warm up, 10 x (0:30 fast/1:00 jog), 2 cool down = 5.65 total. The slow parts were slow but I felt good and the legs felt peppy on the fast parts, which during taper I call a win.

Tuesday 1/30: a.m. strength + 4 easy. Feeling a bit tired (plus heavy post-lifting legs) so keeping it super easy.

Wednesday 1/31: 4 easy. Then off to Cirque du Soleil! Also first day of the bananas rain! 

Thursday 2/1: 4 easy + 4 x 100m strides = 4.57 total. Feeling good, though I think the rain makes me run funny because I'm concentrating so hard on footing. 😅

Friday 2/2: Rest.

Saturday 2/3: 30:00 easy + 4 x 100m strides = 3.7 total. Couldn't find my wool running socks (and also out of granola/energy bars) so made a there-and-back trip to Sports Basement my shakeout. Then tacked on a few strides. 

Sunday 2/4: Kaiser San Francisco Half Marathon!!!! 11 easy.

Obviously I'm disappointed not to get to race when I felt like I'd actually made some good progress over the last month and was looking forward to testing out my fitness. But it's only been a month, so I'm trying to think positively about rolling over the fitness I've built into training for the John Frank 10 Miler on March 2.

🎧In my ears this week:🎧

•  One Of The Good Guys by Araminta Hall. 43-year-old Cole Simmons is restarting his life out on the rural English coast after his marriage fell apart in the wake of several failed rounds of IVF, and soon connects with local artist Lorena “Lenny” Bard. But when two young women walking the coast to raise awareness about male violence towards women disappear under suspicious circumstances, Cole becomes a person of interest. The story starts with Cole’s perspective, then shifts to that of his Lenny, his wife Mel, and various other snippets from news shows, Twitter, online articles, group texts, and so on. A promising start, but Cole’s character quickly devolved into kind of a boring trope. Before too long I found myself agreeing with a reviewer who wrote that you get the sense the book is preaching to the reader about things that seem obvious to anyone who has paid any attention whatsoever to gender politics in the last twenty years. It’s not that I don’t 100% agree with the agenda Hall is pushing here, just that “agenda” novels rarely work, I think because the main priority is so clearly something other than telling an interesting story. 
• The Change by Kirsten Miller. In the speculative world of The Change, postmenopausal women sometimes find that with “the change” has come a kind of superpower – as one character puts it, “The gift arrives after the curse ends.” One woman is able to find the bodies of those who have recently died; another, when it really matters, can summon superhuman strength; another has become a kind of dark mistress of flora. Something has brought three such women–Nessa, Jo, and Henrietta–together to investigate a series of murders which may have much bigger implications than they realize. To be honest (speaking as an almost-43-year-old woman!) it’s kind of refreshing to see middle-aged women and that era of our lives presented as interesting, relevant, and powerful rather than as something to be resigned to now that the “good part” (ugh) is over, which is how it’s so often presented.
• Choosing to Run by Des Linden. The incomparable Des Linden tells her own story, from childhood through her historic 2018 Boston victory. I have to admit that I only really knew bits and pieces of Linden's story so it was neat to hear more of it in her own words, particularly her time with the Hanson Brothers. It was also interesting to hear more about the health crisis that forced her to step away from running for a bit after the 2016 Olympics, which she was pretty quiet about at the time.