HurdlingHam: 1, Mother Nature: 0

First off, I'll give you one hurdle highlight from junior year.  It was the first outdoor meet of the season, I ran my usual 100 hurdles/300 hurdles combo and PRed in 300s, then wound up getting suckered into running the 4 x 400 after wolfing down a hot dog, yikes!  100s didn't go particularly well though, and here's what I had to say about it...

an alright day in the 100s though i still need to break 18! would have won my heat/made finals but the girl in front of me fell and rolled across the finish line!

 What makes this story funny is the girl who rolled across the finish line and beat me out to make finals is now one of my closest friends.  We met at a pre-med meet & greet picnic freshman year of college, somehow got on the topic of that we'd both run hurdles, and I told her about track club.  Over the course of many entertaining hurdle workouts, somehow the topic of the meet where she somersaulted across the finish line came up [as a former gymnast she had that automatic forward roll mechanism haha] and sure enough...we looked up the results from the meet and there we were, 1-2 in the heat - hilarious!  The next year she was sad when I decided to become a distance runner, but I sucked her into distance soon enough and she kicked my ass in a half marathon this past August. So that's gotta be one of my favorite "small world" stories. :)  I can't wait until I convince her to run a marathon....muahaha. :)

Still competing against eachother...but now we're friends too...and she hasn't beat me by rolling across the finish line lately

We've been having some lovely weather in the Boston area this week...and by lovely I mean gray, rainy, windy, and generally disgusting.  Because I'm kind of a weirdo I don't really have a problem with running in the rain, even when it's only 40 or so..it's the wind that really gets me.  So after yesterday's super windy + rainy 6 miler, I was less than excited to pound out 12 miles in yet another rainstorm today.  I figured that if I took the train home from work I might not be able to motivate myself to get back out the door, so I decided to make a 12 mile route leading from work and eventually home.  As usual, my co-workers were amused when I left wearing my spandex and running clothes ["I know where you're going!" "Where? Is she going to the mall?" "How many miles are you running today?"]  Really, I should do a whole separate post some time on my co-workers responses to my running craziness...it's the first time I've really had the experience of non-runners being really exposed to my training and I'm quite proud to have gotten allll the usual comments haha. [How far was that marathon? 6 miles, I couldn't even run 6 blocks!  Who was chasing you?]

So it had been a long and somewhat frustrating day at work...cocker spaniels pooping on the drying table, poodles that just never seemed to be completely dry....the usual haha. When I headed out the door, my legs felt kind of heavy and basically "meh"...I had already tried to convince myself to really take it easy on this run, not really look at my watch, and just roll with it, so I guess I felt OK about the situation.  As the run went on though, I just kind of started feeling better...and better...and loving the rain...and just generally loving life haha.  The weather actually REALLY reminded me of the weather at Baystate which apparently is ideal weather for me to run in? Haha.  There's just something about running in a rainstorm that just makes me feel so incredible...I don't know if it's the idea of being out training in weather that few others would brave, or if it's just the kind of giddy feeling of splashing through puddles and laughing at the sky.  Or maybe it's just that focusing on the rain hitting my face makes me forget about the pain in my legs...who knows.  I only saw 6 other runners over the whole 12 miles: a group of 3 of what looked like high school boys, 2 girls, and one lonely man.  Random thought: so usually when I'm running, if I see another runner I'll give them a smile/wave/head nod depending on how my life is going at that point...but it seems extremely rare that anyone returns the gesture, in fact, it seems like a lot of people kind of avoid eye contact.  I get that people can be very into their workouts, and I'm guilty of that at times myself, but when it's obvious that everyone is running easy, I don't know, isn't it nice to acknowledge the camaradrie between runners? Especially on a day like today, when you'd have to be mildly crazy, hardcore, or both to be out there? Maybe that's just me...thoughts?

I realized about halfway through that maybe running with my ipod wasn't the best decision ever...it got really wet and the buttons seemed to be kind of malfunctioning...of course, that also could have been the fact that I couldn't really move or feel my fingers because they were so cold...like completely frozen.  I was only wearing a long sleeved underarmor type top under a short sleeve tech top and I wasn't really cold in general, but my hands just kind of gradually turned into popsicles.  It took a loooong hot shower afterwards to warm up.  Glad I got my run in early-ish today though, because now there are apparently wind gusts up to 55 mph outside? That's kind of frightening...and I can't even imagine how it would feel to run in that..talk about hitting a brick wall...yikes!

Well, I won't lie...I'm kind of excited about my 4 mile recovery run tomorrow.  I'm probably going to do some yoga too...I'm expecting to be extra sore since it was chilly and wet today.  And I just really LOVE yoga!  It's so nice to switch things up from running once in awhile and feel like I'm doing a little something extra.  For now, it's off to watch the Olympics [women's free skate, yay!!] and stay out of the wind. :)