Monday morning
One-mile run-commute, then stomach bug.
Monday afternoon
1.3-mile walk-commute to pick up my daughter and attend her 1st grade parent-teacher orientation. Slept 12 hours as soon as I got home.
Tuesday, little eating, no exercise, but 2.2 walk-commute. Legs felt fresh and raring to go despite the virus.
Wednesday afternoon
I was starting to get my energy and appetite back, but I decided to hold off on running one more day, and just did bench press at sub max weight, higher reps. I didn't have any energy to do the rest of my upper-body st workout.
Then I got a hypoglycemic reaction just before dinner. I felt light-headed and weak. I ate two hefty hamburgers as an antidote. (If I had known it was National Cheeseburger Day I would've added cheese.) About an hour later I started to feel normal again. I haven't had any trouble with hypoglycemia for decades, but I guess my energy reserves were still depleted after two days of little eating. Probably shouldn’t have done the weights. Or at least I should have popped a protein bar right afterwards.
I woke up an hour after going to bed. My wife hadn’t fallen asleep yet so we chatted. Three hours and three IPAs later (Sierra Nevada Torpedo, Summit Saga, and Boulevard Single-Wide), and a bunch of water, and some stale chips, I slept three more hours.
Thursday morning
One-mile walk commute
Thursday afternoon
12.23 mi / 19.7 km (a few blocks walking)
I got the stupid idea that since I hadn't run for three days, it would be good to try another half-marathonish distance and see if I could get away with it, even though I wasn’t 100% back to normal.
I was still a little behind the energy curve, so I did my best to cram food and water into my system throughout the day. Late morning it stormed and I felt relief that I had been rescued from my foolish plan. But it cleared up after noon. Then just as I was ready to leave my office and tempt fate, a friend called asking for medical advice. His Brazilian fiancée had appendicitis-like pain in her side but no health insurance. Yikes!
So I was late getting out the door, but still intent on trying a 15-mile route that I had been thinking about for a long time. With the stomach bug I was only going to get about half the work I wanted to get done this week anyways, so I used that as a justification for leaving the office almost two hours earlier than normal.
After crossing over the river on Franklin Bridge, the route hops onto the Midtown Greenway, which is a long, east-west pedestrian and bicycle path built over an old railroad line. I'd been wanting to see what that was like for a quite a while.
It was really cool. Most of it passes below street level, under bridges. You would have no idea of where you are if it weren’t for the intermittent postings of street names on the bridges above. My legs felt great and I loved how little green signs popped up every half-mile telling me how far it was to the lakes I was heading for. Reminded me of the well-posted bicycle paths in Denmark.
But then my insurance agent called, so I stopped to chat with him a bit. After that, I looked at my Garmin's clock and realized that with the late start and the insurance chat, there was no way I was going to make it back in time to pick up the kids.
So I left the Midtown Greenway a bit further on and started heading north on Nicollet Ave. I had intended to pick up Nicollet Avenue later in the run, at the southern end of Downtown Minneapolis, after running along Lake of Isles and passing through the Kenwood neighborhood (the toniest neighborhood in Minneapolis). By stopping short of the lakes, and cutting directly to Nicollet, I figured I could shave off about three miles/30 minutes from the route.
Intended Route
Actual Route
This part of Nicollet Ave is full of ethnic restaurants and shops--Mexican, Vietnamese, Somalian, Thai, South Asian--but then it starts to shade into hipster and yuppie establishments just before downtown. It was a lot of fun running through such a purely urban area. I pretended I was back in Chicago. I used to know the Twin Cities really well as a teenager, but since coming back in 2010, my time-geography is mostly restricted to a 3-to-5-mile radius of stores, daycare, and elementary school, and a few well-worn paths to picnic areas. On these longer runs I get to explore my city again and visit areas that have been transformed in the intervening decades.
Once I got to downtown, the place was buzzing with commuter traffic--cars, buses, pedestrians, bicycles, even skate boards. At this point Nicollet Avenue becomes closed off to cars, only buses are allowed to mix it up with all the non-vehicular traffic.
One of the news anchors for a local station was walking towards me and had a very surprised/concerned look on his face. I don't watch much tv so I don't know his name, but I recognized him after a few seconds. He was very tall and had one of those brownish orange fake tans. I kinda wanted to stop and tell him to do a story on barefoot running, featuring me of course. Instead, I just acknowledged his staring with a brief
hey!—as in, “Hey, you’re one of the local news monkeys, aren’t you?”
I don't always enjoy being the freak barefoot runner, but I was really eating it up running through the suits while drenched in sweat, with gray hair and dirty feet from some of the earlier post-storm puddles and mud. It recalled the outsider status I had experienced during my traveling days. I guess my favorite stance is
outside-looking-in. Unfortunately, I had to stop and wait for the lights at almost every intersection while passing through downtown. My pace was just perfect for just missing the next light at virtually every block.
I don't know if this threw me off my game, or if it was due to happen anyway, but shortly thereafter, while crossing the Hennepin Avenue Bridge, my guts started acting up. Oh oh. After a while I slowed to a walk for a few blocks while I tried to decipher my intestinal intentions. What was their intentional as well as physical state? Was it the shits or farts? Liquid, solid, or gas?
After a few blocks of walking, things settled down but then I felt my energy get sucked right out of me, leaving me with a hallow center and heavy legs. My legs still felt loose, but I had no fuel, and perhaps the lack of sleep was catching up to me too. And the sun had come out so the heat enfeebled me further, and I got that sweaty tingle in my spine.
The last three miles were a real slog. If I didn't have a deadline I would've walked.
Once home a verdict on my intestines’ intentional state was reached. I farted. It’s always nice at the end of a stomach bug episode when it’s safe to fart again. I took a quick shower, got some apple slices for my son to snack on in the car, and sped off. I got to my son’s daycare around 5:30 pm. He seemed a little bummed that I was 30 minutes later than usual, but there were still a half-dozen kids around. From there we got to my daughter’s Discovery Club just in time, at 5:55 pm. My wife was also late getting back so we just ordered overpriced pizza for dinner. I ate half of it and washed it down with three IPAs (Sierra Nevada Torpedo, Summit Saga, and Boulevard Single-Wide) and a good half gallon of water. The nice thing about junk food is it's already half-digested for you.
So, another bad finish to a long run, but this time it was the fueling, not leg fatigue. I'm still glad I did it though. It's really a huge confidence booster that I can run these distances under less-than-ideal circumstances and not risk injury. Still, those last three miles were not fun. I hate running like that.
I might try one more semi-epic long run tomorrow, to complete this strange workout week. Then I’ll look forward to a more normal week of mostly mezzo runs and full st sessions next week.
I shot some more pics:
Midtown Greenway
Midtown Greenway was an old railroad line (note convenient green posting of directions and mileage)
Nicollet Avenue goes ethnic
Southern end of Downtown Mpls, where Nicollet veers right slightly into the glass and steel.
Nicollet Avenue turns into a car-free street.
Pretending to be Europeans
"Why is that barefoot freak taking my picture?" (quote from Scratch)
Sidewalk Market
Sediments of building booms--the background glass and steel is like, soooo 80s.
Hennepin Avenue Bridge crossing the Mississippi
View from Hennepin Avenue Bridge--You can see the Stone Arch Bridge under the foreground bridge, with the spillway on the left, and the lock on the right side.
Quaint area of old mattress factories turned into shops and restaurants where I practiced delinquency in hs before it got gentrified.
The reconstructed 35W Bridge (I was in Mozambique when it collapsed in 2007)
U of M Campus
yaa Nick! way to knock up your woman with your sperm. now drag that thing out and get ready for the next.
You such a sentimentalist Mike
I do agree about Minnepolis being a bike friendly city I did noticed it.
