Respect the Run: Kicked the 15k’s a$$, BTW I chafed my gooch & I <3 female runners, and Babu

The SIL asked what “HAM”  was, it’s “Hard as a Mofo” from this..

We are going to start today’s post out with some TMI. We haven’t nearly enough TMI since the AD story finished and I for one, think we are WAY past due.  This morning, while I was kicking the ass of a 15k I was afraid of less than 12 hours ago, I chafed my gooch.  Yes, my  gooch, my taint, that very tender narrow pass between your honey boo boo and where your dude is always trying to put it.   I know you are asking “how do you know?”. I know because when I went to lower myself gingerly without any cussing and settle demurely in the ice bath my brain promised my muscles at mile 8.0 if  they would just go “HAM” for the next 20 minutes it would reward them with a luxurious 20 minutes in freezing  cold water.  You laugh at this run on  of all run on sentences, but I’m  not done with this run on thought so the joke is on you…Ha!  The kind of freezing cold water that starts to give you hypothermia, the kind of freezing cold water that I must sometimes  scooch my toes all the way out as far as I can, but only as far as to still be covering my big toe knuckle thingy where it joins my foot, which BTW always leaves my pinkie toe still mostly submerged. I worry about what this says of the freakishness of my feet and toes, as my feet and toes are in my opinion fat, pudgy and ugly, and I feel yucky about them only slightly more so than my ankles.  They are the yin to the yang of my narcissistic obsession with my glorious naturally curly hair and light greenish/brownish but mostly green eyes.  Oh crap,  we are back to my eyes and hair and off my gooch.  Back to my gooch.  I know I chafed my gooch because as I was lowering myself into previously mentioned ice bath i felt that horrible awful stinging of water on chafed skin.  You may also recognize this as what it felt like when you nursed and got a chafed nipple and didn’t figure it out until you went to get your once every 3-4 days shower for 5 minutes of the baby isn’t crying time.  It’s.. i kind even describe it.  Remember those Indian Sissy Burns  we used to give ourselves with pencil erasers as kids? It Feels like that only multiplied by a factor of  some sort of equation of the size of the burn times the area the burn is in.  Oh? You never did that as a kid? Well then I feel badly for you because now you don’t know  what  chafing feels like.  IT SUCKS!!!!!!!!!  Unfortunately chafing is also one of those runner injury badass mofo thing that no one tells you about until you get one for the first time and wonder WTF do I have cancer? For the record,  this did not happen to my but to a runner buddy in our Y training group.  When I got my first chafing injury I knew EXACTLY what it was. I nursed two children on one boob.   That is why one is about a full cup size bigger than the other one. It’s one of those weird quirks of my breast besides their size that made them so “popular” on the internet. Oh look it’s the trifecta, I have now mentioned my hair, eyes and boobs. Let me throw in that I am putting bling jeans on my ass and shaking it tonight t o close out the four horsemen of the Lolapocalypse and then I promise to stick to mundane running parts from now on.  As soon as I am done talking about my gooch,  I am almost done I promise.  Chafing happens to men and women runners and can crop up in the oddest of places. I get it often on the underside of my arm or arms where t-shirt or my running band rub. It can crop up on your inner thighs when you wear a running skirt, unless you have factory air/hardwood floors, and if you do I salute you and covet your well shaped legs and ass.  I don’t think I had factory air when I was 17 and weighed 121 pounds.  The good news is they make a great product called Body Glide that you can rub on all of those tender vulnerable areas and voila, no chafing.  I go through about a stick a season. I pick them up for about $6-10 at the Dick’s or local running store.  If you, like me, forget to use the Body Glide and wear a pair of newer pants you have only previously put 4 miles in, just put Aquaphor on the affected area until it heals. DO NOT RUB LOTION ON IT!!!!!!!!!!   And that Lovies, ends the first TMI portion of my running post today.

I woke up  over and hour early for the 15K race today. 4;45 am, on the dot.  I do it before almost every single big event  morning of my life.  It seems to be my body clock’s panic alarm clock base time.  I stayed calm and followed my ritual for when this happens.  I kept my eyes closed, worked on relaxing and stretching my legs. I tried to breath deeply and just rest, not obsess about going back to sleep.  I trained myself to do this when the kids were babies. I should say I  MiniMe trained me to be this way she she was a horrific not ever sleepy always pissed off infant.  I think some parents call that colic, In our house we called it 2 hour shifts so the baby doesn’t die and/or the parent literally loses sanity.  I also used this time to have a BGP talk with myself about the Race. It was only a race. I will be running 10,0 on Wednesday. I get to earn an ice bath. Hey maybe my legs aren’t as tight as they have been. I will run the whole thing. i am not sick so it can’t be as bad as the 10K.  etc…  It must of worked because when I got up I felt pretty alert and not too stumbly.  I made my waffle,  drank about 16oz of water, got dressed and started to stretch. Babu and I picked up bibs on Thursday so we weren’t leaving until about 1:15 before the race. I drank my Herbalife Prolong pre workout drink thing, another 16 ounces on the way there and about 30 minutes before the race I ate a packet of Cherry Beans with Caffeine.  I stretched more right in the garage and before the race as we lined up, When we started  I felt pretty good. I  would say I felt great, but I was hypersensitive to my legs and probably cost myself a good 20% in confidence.   On this course we always get a point within a mile or so in where one of the loops has the  race leaders running. As soon I see them I get goose bumps every time.  They are easily on mile 4ish. the race time was 17:xx in. Seventeen minutes and they have completed the first loop.  As soon as I see them I start looking for the first girl. because sooner than some jack hole around me every time thinks, there is going to be one soon.  And she is going to be in front of plenty of men who are also seriously fast.  As soon as I see her i get  overwhelmed with emotion, every single time.  As soon as I see one I start to look for more, as the packs come racing past my  barely sub 12:00 pace each one will be filled with more and more girls.  There are some seriously committed athletes in those packs.  I’m not saying I’m a running slouch, but you don’t get to that pace without dedicating yourself to the training required to make your body, your heart, and your lungs obtain and maintain that  speed over distance.  Each time I see those glorious role models of this sport I am so absolutely insanely in love with I get so filled with emotion I start to cry a little bit.  I might have tears just writing about it now. I start to tear up and my pace starts to pick up. I start to run faster and faster and my will, which is 70% of the running battler, is buoyed by their mere presence.  I’m the crazy curly haired chubby older lady screaming “GET IT GIRL” at that first female runner every single time.  I want her to know what she and every one of those ladies behind her do for me.  They help me run faster and stick it  to that one due in every race, without fail, you gets all offended when I am outrunning him and suddenly starts pumping up his game to keep up or catch up.  Every time without fail we leave him in the dust.  Babu gets the biggest kick out of it and has started pointing them out to me when he finds them. He found today’s dude and started laughing. “he’s worried about you”, he told me.

Today’s Mantra was “Get This”, ” I Got This” and a lot of ” It’s just a little hill, it will all be over soon”. We ran well and hard mile after mile. I had to pee at Mile 2,  we got water and did the swish and spit. I allow myself to walk for water and I just kept pretending I only had to run to the next check point and I could get a little break.  I wanted to run well today.  I wanted a sub 12:00 race.  within 4-5 miles it looked very  possible.  When I was able to hold to mile 8 I just knew I could put in the  work to get 20 more minutes out of my body and get to the 9.6 before 2 hours.  Babu was an amazing runny partner this morning. No spats and he did a good job of keeping an eye on my pace. He is always the one who snaps me out of my first female runner crazy emotion driven super fast pace.  You’re running way outside your pace is his cue for that one.  He was pushing me today and I knew it. I didn’t mind because he has to downgrade his pace  to stay with me and that is actually more work for him than running at his naturally faster pace.   My internal goal has always been that I would grow and strengthen as a runner to get to a 9 minute mile over a 13.1.  That would be nirvana for me.  At mile 8.o I promised my muscles an ice bath if they went “HAM” for me  for the next 20 minutes and helped us to finish with a pace under 12:00.   They did.   We  rocked that run.  That is the longest I have ever run without doing any walking.  I’m no longer afraid of the 10.0 on Wednesday.

I Hope you all enjoy your Easter weekend  Lovies. I’m going to take a nap and go listen to a band play with SIL, Baker and Fun Size later.