the day kier told the wind who was boss

From the National Weather Service - attention runners, Mother Nature has decided to continue her quest to make your running lives miserable. She will continue to create winds that will always seem to be against you, blowing at least 15 mph constantly and gusting up to 40 mph 99% of the time. No matter what, you cannot avoid the windy wrath of Mother Nature.

Uuugh - this has been the story of my running life for the past three weeks! Every single long run I have battled against the wind for a majority of my route. While it is good training conditions for a potentially windy marathon up in Fargo, it reminds me of my last marathon in Tulsa, OK. Gah - I don't like to be reminded of that race.

Today the winds seemed especially bad, maybe just because I was tackling 20 miles and it was the last super long run before Fargo.  I was not really looking forward to heading out and managed to procrastinate for a good 2 hours before lacing up thee old running shoes.

I decided to head into the run for the first 10+ miles of the run, thus having the wind at my back for the last half.  Good idea. I headed out not letting the wind get to me (though it did literally take my breath away quite a few times) and just focused on keeping a slow consistent pace.

All in all it was a good run.  I stopped a few too many times towards the end (to walk up hills, strip off a layer, etc) but hey - I finished.

20 miles = a lot harder than 18 miles.

The stats::

mile 1 - 8:27                    mile 2 - 8:53                    mile 3 - 9:03                    mile 4 - 9:02
mile 5 - 9:01                    mile 6 - 8:56                    mile 7 - 10:18 (2 dates)   mile 8 - 9:11
mile 9 - 9:11                    mile 10 - 9:37                  mile 11 - 12:38 (1 gu)     mile 12 - 8:55
mile 13 - 9:14                  mile 14 - 9:08                  mile 15 - 9:49                  mile 16 - 9:22
mile 17 - 10:27 (2 dates) mile 18 - 10:50                mile 19 - 9:30                   mile 20 - 9:08

Total distance - 20.04 miles
Total time - 3:11:04
Average pace - 9:32
Elevation change - 180 feet (does that make sense? There was a difference of 180 feet between the lowest point and the highest point).

The run was done on one of my favorite county highways that I have always wanted to run, but the windy road + epic hills have always kept me away.  The city is currently paving the shoulders to make biking and running on this road safer and had up quite a few "road closed to thru traffic" signs, so there was surprisingly little traffic.

Here is the elevation profile of today's run:



Compared to the elevation profile of the Fargo Marathon:



Okay, so the graphs might not be too comparable, but you can see that today's route was just a bit more hilly than Fargo's is.

The instant I got home, I hauled two very heavy bags of ice up from the basement and filled up the tub with extremely cold water + ice.  I then inflicted the worst pain on myself for approximately 4.5 minutes.


Eeewww - please don't make fun of my stomach or my dirty shower. kthanks.

Torture. Pure torture.

But my legs felt very refreshed afterwards. I guess ice baths are a good thing.

I feel confident that I will PR at Fargo as long as I can hold onto a positive attitude.

Sub 4 here I come!