TERWILLIGER DETOX

Elevation chart from Saturday's long run. Snickering at general shape of chart encouraged.

Sometimes I'm not very smart. Okay, maybe a lot of the time. Friday night was a shining example of this fact. I'm a Portland Timbers season ticket holder and Friday was their home first game in a couple weeks and only one until a few weeks later. So I decided to really enjoy things and live it up. The night before a sixteen mile run. You can see where this is heading.

Anyways, after work I have a couple beers with my co-workers. I then meet Libbie for dinner downtown and have another beer with dinner. We then get to the stadium and I decided to have just one more beer to ease me through the two hour game. If I had stopped there, things probably would have been fine. However, my company was having a team building event on the private party deck (I didn't want to take a ticket from someone to get on there when I already had a ticket), and my co-workers managed to sneak me out multiple free beers from there. It was fun at the time.

Saturday morning and it wasn't so much fun any more. I felt like absolute shit. I still set my alarm for 7:15am to join Portland Marathon Clinic for their 16 mile run. I really enjoyed PMC last year and have been meaning to join them for runs sooner. Anyways, I feel like I want to throw up, I'm running on five hours sleep, I've got a banging headache, but I start driving to the run before I can think about it too much. Along the way I'm thinking of the physics of barfing out the window at 65mph. What if I couldn't pull over in time?

I finally get to the run and have to park about eight blocks away. How am I going to do this, I feel terrible. I just keep reminding myself I can always turn around during the run if I can't physically do it. One thing I'm really worried about is the bathroom situation. I feel a rumble, and after the night before, the product wasn't going to be pretty. Luckily, the track we met at had bathrooms and I took full advantage of that. Thank goodness they had toilet paper.

After that I'm feeling a bit more confident. I still don't feel good, but I'm probably not going to shit my pants now. We get started around 8:10am and while the first few miles kind of sucked (straight uphill), I actually started to feel better the longer the run went. I didn't really realize it before I started running, but this was my longest run since the Vancouver Marathon by two miles. It wasn't an easy course either, up and down Terwilliger. I'm happy to say it went really well though. I started feeling better once I ran and the sixteen miles wasn't a big deal.

All in all pretty encouraging. It was nice to run through my hangover (except a sensitive tummy still, I was good to go afterwards) and finally do another run with PMC. I love the company and the aid stations they provide. I even got to see Shalane Flanagan charging up Terwilliger in the other direction. Man that blob of blonde hair can move! Last week marked the first week of my training for Portland, so I'll have more on that in a little bit. Excited to rev things back up!