Ugly Toes

But today, I am walking like an old lady, too. I was going to get up and run this morning but I'm a little too sore. Luckily, it's gotten better as the day has gone on. I'm almost strangely amused that, ITB aside, I might be more stiff/sore from the 10 miles than I was from Freescale.

The crazy part of my title is because I think running does something to your brain. Especially running around in the woods in 90% humidity. (I finally found the weather report from yesterday and it was 67-69 degrees with 90% humidity). Because I vividly remember running yesterday thinking "damn, this sucks. I am never running this again. I hate this. Why am I here? I wish a water stop would appear. Crap, it's only been ? This sucks."

YET as I was posting last night, and when I talked to the Engineer last night the word "fun" kept popping into my mind. How does that happen? It must be like childbirth, where your mind tricks you into forgetting that it hurts so you'll go through it again. I'm sticking to road racing for the rest of the summer, though. Maybe, and that's a big maybe, I'll try again next year. But am I ever glad that my first trail adventure was "only" 10 miles as opposed to the 15.5 (25K) I had thought about doing.

Want to see something scary? Go take a look at these pictures from the Afton FatAss. I think I would cry. I'm on a mailing list with a lot of MN trail/ultra runners, and I have a whole new level of respect for them after seeing pictures and actually running a trail.

Here's another report from yesterday, this one from a speedy college guy. This is how he described the hills:

"A word about the hills--if I were to approximate the topographical layout of the course here, it'd look a little like this:
/\_/\/\/\/\_/\/\/\/\--hills all of them about a 200-300 foot gain in elevation at slopes of 20-30 degrees."