Did some light softball on Monday evening. Time-trialed on my commuter to the bar for some bar trivia after the game. Tried to beat my friends in their car, but 5 miles proved to be a little too far for me to outpace them by bicycle. Still, they only beat me by a minute or two, so I did all right. Tuesday was another off day. My knee was still feeling a bit bum, and I just was feeling in a funk anyway due to this problem I'm having trouble solving at work.
Wednesday - 1:35 - Arb
Finally coerced myself to run again even though I was uncertain about my knee. Knowing I haven't run in a week and haven't done anything longer than 10 miles in like 2 weeks, I didn't want to get into a mindfuck and opted to put electrical tape over the distance and pace sections of my Garmin screen. After the first mile, I realized I also had to turn off the one mile auto lap. But after that, I have no idea how far or fast I ran. Planning to keep it that way until I feel 100% with my knee again. Instead my goal is just to make sure I'm out on the trails for at least an hour a day and just run until I start to hurt more than I feel like I should for a recovering body. Hopefully, I start feeling solid soon enough, and I can go back to cranking out 20+ mile runs again. Until then, we'll see.
But the knee was sketchy for the first 45 minutes, so I'd stop and walk a section here and there until I felt good again, and then went again. By the end of the run, my knee was feeling fine, as in I wasn't noticing it anymore. What happened instead was my ankles from 2 weeks off the trails began crying out from all the varied terrain, and then I opted to head home. Going to try to do this again tomorrow before 4th celebrations happen in full. Happy America day, everyone!
Oh, also, saw some new turkey babies today! As I accidentally snuck up on them, my goal was to appease the situation and get out of their way. Otherwise, I might've tried to grab some pictures. My bad.
Thursday - 2:03 - Arb
Knee's feeling even better than yesterday. It's even stopped doing the weird locking thing when I walk. So, maybe a dose of trails was all that was needed. Spent the day just trying to go down different trails that aren't in my brain catalog. This lead me to having a few stare downs with some turkeys and scaring away a raccoon that was munching on some of the blackberries all over the Grady and Evjue sections of the Arb. Even had a brief moment with the doe below. We stared at each other for a good minute or so, long enough for me to pull out my camera and snap a picture.
Also ran with the Ultimate Direction AK vest again. Been making myself do that lately to get used to the fact that I'll probably have to wear it in actual races. But made it to two hours today without any problems. Started to feel the tired legs that I've come to expect to hit around mile 14-15, so I'm feeling like I've probably already bounced back from my brief week-long respite. Will probably take tomorrow off and then try doing a 4-ish hour run sometime this weekend.
Friday-Saturday - Off
Sunday - 3:30 - Ice Age Trail (IAT)
This turned into a messy day. I was ambivalent about driving out to the Kettle-Moraine forest and putting in heavy mileage, so I resisted until about 3:00 pm, when I knew I'd run out of daylight if I waited any longer. The flaw in this was that the heat index had just peaked above 90. Regardless, the first hour or so was pretty good. There were swarms of mosquitoes, but the bug spray I had invested in with supposed ability to survive sweat was finally keeping bugs off of me for once. So, I stopped along the way and took some nice photos without fear of bites. By the time I reached the section of trail where I had planned to veer off onto a horse trail, the wheels had started to come off. I was pretty certain there was a water fountain in the parking lot off of this trail, but the trail dead-ended like 2 miles into it before I got to the parking lot (I still don't know what the deal was, but I couldn't stop to figure it out due to the mosquitoes now attacking me). But I knew there was a forest headquarters about a mile further into the IAT, where I had veered off. I turned around and got back on the IAT, and at this point almost 2 hours in, I was out of water, but was feeling well enough. By the time I got to the headquarters, I was starting to not feel that great. The heat and low amount of fluids had started getting to me. My goal at the headquarters was to chug some water, get as wet as possible, get rid of the buckets of sand that had filled my shoes while I had been on the very sandy horse trail, and then get going. This turned into a 15 minute ordeal as every time I tried to stop moving, I was instantly attacked by mosquitoes (ie: that so-called sweat resistant bug spray sucked balls)
But I got going, and I was so mad about the sand from before that I refused to take the horse trail back to my car and continued on the IAT the same way I'd come in. I also figured with decreasing daylight and the foggy head that comes after many hours in the Sun, a new trail wasn't advised. But any time I tried to stop to check my blood sugar, I was destroyed by mosquitoes, so I couldn't stop to get anything from the back of my vest or really slow down from a run at all. And the gels I had up front had become unpalatable, probably from the heat+dehydration. Trying to eat them made me start gagging. The only nutrition I could do without throwing up was the hydration mix in the bottles.
And so it was a 10-ish mile death march of pain, mosquitoes, and dehydration back to my car. Even better, I had forgotten how technical the last mile to my car would be, and the waning daylight turned that into a nightmare with me tripping on roots and rocks all over the place. My body was unhappy with that. But I made it back to the car and headed to the fountain across the street and chugged two bottles of water, ate the PB&J I'd prepared, and drove straight home. After a few hours I even talked myself into eating a light dinner!
Totals:
~45-50 miles
~7 hours
White-tailed doe in Arb. We had a brief staring contest.
Some pretty Arb flowers; if I'm identifying them correctly, I think they're purple prairie coneflowers (they were in the prairie).
The iconic yellow blaze of the Ice Age Trail:
A "scenic view" along the IAT:
And this, because why not?
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