I haven’t been to Brian’s parents lake house in at least five years. I always said it was because there was too much cleaning involved for a two-day weekend. It is always so nice to arrive to a clean house with fresh sheets and towels but it’s a lot of work to leave it that way. Ok I hate cleaning and the drive down there and back. Today’s was Brian’s fiftieth birthday so I decided we would have family weekend at the lake to celebrate. I drove down after work but everyone else left at noon. I didn’t want them to all wait on me and this way I could leave early enough to be back tonight in time for the edge.

I am currently training for a 50K race. This all started over fourth of July when I remembered saying four years ago I wanted to run 50 miles on my fiftieth birthday. The big five 0 is this coming May. So I researched how to train for a 50 mile run and it said to start with a 50K. So I pulled up the training plans and mapped out the next nine months of my life. I found a 50K about three hours passed Emily in Kansas so I roped her into going with me. I found a 50 mile on April 29 in Springfield Missouri. I decided if I am really going to pull off fifty miles, I at least need a shirt and a medal out of it. The current race is one week easy, one week hard regarding mileage. This week was the hard week which meant I had a 24 mile run, followed by a 10 mile run. It also meant I had to run it down at the lake. After just two miles I remembered the real reason I stopped coming, because all of the long runs are on the weekend and the lake is nothing but hills. I don’t mind some hills but it is insane down there. I did my 24 on Friday and it was by far the most brutal run (walk mostly) I have ever done. I went nine miles between finding a gas station to get water. I was very close to calling Brian and telling him he needed to deliver me drinks. He would have done it, but I would have never lived it down. I overshot how far out to go by like three miles because of the gas station issue. The last two hours the heat index had shot up to over 100 degrees. I was walking on the side of highway 5 and I could feel the heat just radiating up off the black top cooking me even more. The last three miles were scary. I was starting to get chills when the wind blew which every runner knows means dehydration. I was still able to make spit and recite my ABC’s and my name and social security number. Although I could have been delusional in thinking I was doing it right. I just knew there was no way I could walk the additional three miles back to the lake house so I had Brian come and pick me up. The biggest cause of injuries is over training so I wasn’t having any of that or dropping over dead. Everyone was freaking out because the side of the highway I was running on had no shoulder. It has just as much shoulder as 61/67 and every single car got over into the middle instead of seeing how close they could come to me like some of the jerks here at home. They should have been more worried about dehydration. However I survived, I finished the run and I did ten miles the next day. After I got home and looked at my Fitbit I knew I was so right in avoiding the hills of the Ozarks.

To put this in perspective two weeks ago when I did 22 miles up to Melville high school and back I only did 200 flights of stairs. Fitbit counts every ten feet of elevation as a flight of stairs. It is always off on my miles. I know I did 24 because I use Nike+ app and it’s always very close to accurate. My mother in law asked me who said I had to run 24 and then 10. So I filled her in on what I was doing which made me think about this ~ you reap what you sow which was spoken about at camp and should be my next blog.

Mole Moral~Only crazy insane people get up at 7 am and walk for 6 1/2 hours in extreme heat to prep for a 31 mile race! Yep that’s me!