Trailrunning Training

Tough Mudder is part obstacle course, part mini-trail-running marathon.  The course I'll be running/climbing/swimming/crawling on is ten miles long.  Conveniently enough, just ten minutes from my house is Lake Habeeb, part of Rocky Gap State Park.  Coincidentally, the trail that loops the entire like is....5 miles long!  So while I haven't gotten up to 10 miles yet, I could, in theory, run the lake twice, and somewhat simulate a Tough Mudder course.  So now all I need is a good solid thunderstorm to turn it into a mud bog, a few monkey bars, and a couple of people to Taser me (Warning: expletives abound in the video, but you'll see why) as I run to get the full effect. But we'll work up to that.

In all seriousness, this loop is actually a great trail to run/bike/hike.  Here's me carrying my son in a baby backpack yesterday morning.  We did about an hour and a half, maybe 2.5 miles, before it got too hot to really have a toddler out.

After dropping the family back off at the house and fueling up with a PB&J (my son's, which he refused to eat) and a few pieces of fruit, I headed back out to the Lake for my first full run around it.  By the way, unless you're living in a cave, you know that it's still really hot out:

www.weather.com

But the trail around Lake Habeeb is pretty well shaded, and I brought one of my Camelbacks filled half with water in a liquid state and half with it in solid state.  So I ran.  And honestly, while it was really tough, it just didn't seem as hot as the other night.  I did have to stop and walk a few times, but once was because some friends called from out of town- they were passing through town on their way to vacation and wanted to stop in for a few minutes.  The rest were because I was exhausted.  I think the heat just really takes the energy out of my legs.  Normally, I can just run and run, but man, the last two runs have been in this heat and it's just brutal.  Luckily, Tough Mudder seems to relish the cold and my event is at the end of October, so hopefully it will be kind of cool.  

So my plan is to keep running around the Lake, and maybe sometime soon I'll throw in a swim across a portion of it to simulate the water obstacles in TM.  So stay tuned for that!

Running in bath water

Today's high was 100, and as I'm writing this at midnight, it is 86 with 72% humidity, so it feels like 96.  So let's say for argument's sake that when I started running tonight at 9 p.m., it was hot.  Now, I've run a two-mile PT test in Kuwait at about 105 degrees in 13 minutes and 26 seconds, but it just didn't feel as hot as it was tonight.  It was a dry heat- you don't sweat.  I sweated tonight.

It was only my 3.64 miles circuit, but I had to stop a few times to just walk for a bit.  All told, I probably walked a quarter of a mile out of the whole run, but that's not something I normally do.  It was just really, really hot.  And the temperature isn't what really got me.  It was the humidity.  You know the indoor swimming pools that a lot of hotels have?  You walk from their nice, air conditioned lobby, with it's clean smell and quiet atmosphere, into the pool room: a sauna filled with the cacophonous sound of children playing and the overwhelming smell of  chlorine.  Well, exchange the chlorine for cigarette smoke, and the sound of children playing with couples fighting about who is going to watch the kids while one of them goes off to jail; and you have my run through Cumberland tonight. 

Honestly, with all the training I had in the military about heat injuries, I should have known better than to run on a night like tonight.  But I have worked out three days in a row, and I wanted to keep the momentum going.  So, I ran through the smoke and haze, and finished it all off with a few gallons worth of ice water, complements of my supportive wife.