Winter Series

I ran in a race today. My first since November.

Don't let the sunshine fool you. It was a frigid 11 degrees. As I was driving over to the campus of UAlbany, I wondered if there would be any sort of turn out. Maybe I'd be the only idiot there, raring to run in 11 degrees. If not, maybe there would be about twelve people there and I would have a chance at winning something. I was certainly shocked when I walked into the registration room to find hundreds of crazy people like myself.

I went in thinking I was going to be running a 5k, the equivalent of 3.1 miles. I was mistaken. There were three options, 4.5, 10, or 20 miles. Seeing as this was my first race in such extreme weather conditions, I decided on the 4.5 miler. 

Waiting for the races to start, I noticed everyone was wearing tight, black pants. The same tight, black pants that I had on under my sweatpants. Thinking these people have raced in this kind of weather before, I followed their lead and discarded my sweatpants. Another thing I was mistaken about. I should have stuck with my guns and kept the sweatpants on. By mile number one, my legs were numb. I kept poking them to see just how numb they were. I couldn't feel myself poking. Somehow, even with numbness setting in, they just kept trudging along. 

After 2.5 miles, I began to get hot. Uncontrollably hot. My shoulders down to my fingertips burned. Was I just starting to literally warm-up, or was this the onset of frostbite? I wasn't quite sure. But, nonetheless, I kept running, figuring I'd find out soon enough. 

The next mile a girl came up behind me as we got hit with a vicious wind. Probably a wind that made the 11 degrees feel about zero! We had a small conversation about how lucky we'd been up till then to have the wind behind us. As she passed, I took note of how bouncy she was. Each step her feet reacted like little springboards. My numb legs, on the other hand, seemed to be going in slow motion compared to this jumping bean of a girl. It really ticked me off! 

Coming down the home stretch, I sped up to what I knew my legs could handle without failing me. It was a little slower than I would normally speed up to, again, due to the numbness factor. To my delight, I passed the jumping bean and finished in 16th place overall in men and women. Even with the pains that came along with this race, I felt very satisfied at the finish. I survived, as I knew I would. In fact, I am looking forward to the next one in two weeks. If the temperature gets up to 20, I will be doing the 10 miler. 

And, by the way, Jeff wore a bow-tie for his game this afternoon. He got bow-tie like results as they went on to an 18-point win!