Rain, Rain, Go Away!

Summer running...... I had envisioned battling heat, humidity and debilitating dehydration but so far that has only been a small part of my summer training. The most interesting part of my summer marathon training is learning to run long distances in the rain. Apparently mother nature has decided to bestow us with a multitude of  H2O this summer and I've had to learn to love it. 

This is where it began. It was supposed to be a "fun" 5k with the kids but OH NO! No, no, no, no, no....   It was miserable.  So miserable that they cut the race down from 3.1 miles to more like 2.5!  I was shocked when I crossed the finish line in under 30 minutes  while pushing a double stroller but when I looked at my watch I saw the distance was no where near 3.1. Ah well.  The quicker that run was over with the better. The kids were miserable and wet and so were we!

This is where it continued.  We went to WV for the 4th of July and for my oldest son's 9th birthday party. We had a 12 mile training run scheduled for this weekend. Let me preface by saying I was not looking forward to this run in the first place, simply because it was in WV. There happens to be a lot of hills in WV!   We woke up early that Saturday to get our run over with early but mother nature said "Nay! Nay! My friends!" It was an absolute down pour. My husband and I drove around trying to wait it out, hoping that it would slow down enough for us to run without water boarding ourselves but we ended up giving up and going back home.  

Even the ducks were trying to escape from the rain.  That or Barry..... 

 We waited around until 10 am and finally the rain decided to let up......for 30 minutes. We were not even a mile in to our run when it started pouring the rain down on us again.  We were soaked within minutes and we looked at each other and decided to just go with it. We were wet, we needed to run so lets just get this over with.  My shoes were squishing by mile 2  and I had 10-11 more miles to go. There was one other crazy out in this madness  besides ourselves and I thought he was stark raving mad! He put his hands in the air and said to me "this feels amazing!!!!"  and all I could think is "NO! You know what would feel amazing!??!?  Dry Shoes!"  

After accepting my fate and deciding that this was just going to be a nasty, rainy run, I actually started to enjoy it. The sound of the rain was relaxing and it's kind of hard to get really hot when you have mother nature giving you a cold shower. In the end I ran 13.1 miles in the park that day. That was my longest run since the Capital City Half in May and I finished about 10 minutes faster, which I find hilarious. (That tells you what kind of day I was having that lovely day in May)

Above is a picture at mile 12. I was done here but I managed to get a second wind and sprint in after this. It helped that it was also down hill :-)  I almost wanted to cry. I never imaged I would run that far in that park. Back in the winter it killed me to do 5 miles there and now I have ran 13!

The following weekend, this past weekend, was also another wet one! I woke up to a deluge of water running down the windows yet again.  I managed to run 9 miles though, on another hilly course and did so with a fairly good pace. I am starting to believe that I may be training for a marathon in the rain forest. I'm slowly conditioning my feet to resist succumbing to trench foot. I'll take a rainy run over 80 degrees and humid any day!
The rest of the week looks like a good chance of rain as well so I might as well suck it up, learn to run without my phone and learn to love the feeling of wet pants.