Comedy

In yesterday's post I promised a blog about my long run last Sunday.....here goes.....

In typical Erin fashion I neatly got out the appropriate number of jelly beans, filled my water bottles, laid out my Garmin and shoes in preparation for my run. I am kinda (read TOTALLY) obsessive about having enough jelly beans and spacing them out during a long run. It keeps me going and I get to decide which flavor per mile, etc. Whatever it takes to get by.....

The run started off decent, not great. I was surely not 100%, but I knew I was not out to break any speed records. The first stop light we got to required a pause of my Garmin as a car was coming and I would have to stop (despite it being 6am on a Sunday, yes there are cars on the road! HA!). This polite (or crazy) driver stopped at the green light to let me go ahead, so it was a quick stop-start for me to get the heck out of their way.

About 5 miles later I glanced down at my watch to realize.....I never re-started my watch at the light. Ok, so this is like the moment you realize you've lost your keys, or your ID. Devastation. I had not done a 9 mile out on this particular path in months, so now it was up to Chris and I to figure this out. Thankfully Chris had has handy iPhone and stopped to calculate it out for me. Crisis (semi) averted as we were still 'ball-parking' but it was pretty close. I got to my turn around point and was THRILLED to know I would get to have some jelly belly's soon! At mile 10 I usually start supplementing, so I reached into my waist pouch to grab my bag, opened it and grabbed 3 beans....instantaneously the bottom of the Ziploc split and ALL but those trusty 3 beans were GONE. Ok, so I have 8 more miles, I'm already struggling and now I have 3 beans (a whopping 15 calories) to get me by. By this time all I could do was laugh.

In my mind I could head Dad saying, "what'dya learn?" and I already knew this run would be a lesson in many things....double/triple checking to re-start my watch, not using a recycled Ziploc bag to hold my Jelly's and having a back-up set of supplements...just in case.

The cool thing about training....not only are you preparing your body, but Sunday's run became a way to train my mind. One mile at a time.....