Story
Being married to our Challenge Race Director, @adamengst, I hear about the Challenge most days—we have a ton of fun talking about it. One slogan of the Challenge I hear a lot is the “Cover the Ground” slogan on our shirts. This means you can walk, run, crawl, wade in the creek, or stop to eat a snack, whatever. You can double back if you get lost. The point is to cover the course. The other thing I hear often is “it is supposed to be a challenge.”
For me, running is mostly about being happy: Running through the woods on a sunny morning with friends, laughing and telling stories. Or effortlessly skimming across the landscape on a fall afternoon with my molecules merging with the scenery. Or feeling wildly alive while racing as fast as I can and outrunning expectations. But I can’t get to those feelings without work, and I’ve been working all year to come back from my herniated disc and subsequent surgery.
This run included some work and it called deeply on both those slogans for me. @caroline-brockner was my running buddy and she is a cheerful and steady runner—it was so much easier with a friend to keep me going. We walked the steeper uphills. Around 7 miles, Adam passed us on his eliptigo bicycle and he said that @Gretchen’s water stop was just a little way ahead. That “little way” was a tough mile—I was starting to flag with the distance and the heat.
The water stop was slice of heaven. Gretchen had her Challenge lawn sign up as well as a special FLRC sign. She had a cooler full of cold water bottles and ice packs—and beer—and a table with salty snacks. I drank one bottle of water and poured another one over my head. This felt amazing. One error was that I got my shorts wet on the inside of my thighs from pouring that water on myself, and that caused chafing later. Oops!
The 7.7-mile partial-Treman that I enjoyed running last weekend was my longest run so far this year, so the last few miles of this hilly 10.4-mile course were truly challenging for me. No single body part was hurting, but it got harder and harder to move myself forward. I could barely run down Vandemark road, and the last few yards back to the Brookton Market happened through willpower alone. That’s when I kept thinking “it’s supposed to be a challenge.”
I don’t need to do this run again anytime soon; I will leave that to @lizhartman who has been eating this run up like candy on Halloween night. However, I am now feeling like the Lick Brook Treman course might be possible for me. I’m planning to do it on the last weekend before the Challenge ends, so if I can just not get COVID and keep on running…
(In this photo, I want to put my arm around Caroline’s shoulder, but I am incredibly sweaty and it is hot in the sun, so I’m not quite touching her.)
Shop Local
I had an egg, cheese, and seitan breakfast sandwich at Brookton market. The seitan was an experiment. I already knew what it tastes like, and I was hoping it would be yummy in place of sausage. It was OK, but next time I will stick to the sausage. Adam and I stayed for a while to chat with Bill, a fellow Challenge runner, which was a lot of fun.
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to my previous run, but I covered the ground and had a much better experience!