20 Miles With Ike

I did a 20 mile training run on Sunday. For those that don’t know, you need to do this if you want to run a marathon. Anyway, running 20 miles is hard enough, but I headed out right as the remnants of Hurricane Ike were rolling into town. It was just crazy! Okay, for the first 6-8 miles, it was just really windy. But then it got really windy. I mean shit was falling down everywhere.

The trail that I run on is a paved multi-use trail along the Olentangy river. There are a couple little wood chip diversions through the woods that I normally take. Well, I went to take one, and it wasn’t there! Well, it was there, but trees has fallen down on it so it wasn’t there. Also, I kept hearing the sound of what I thought was lightning. I looked around and realized that it was trees snapping. Yikes. As I ran, limbs and such fell around me. It was like being shelled. I figured it was highly unlikely that anything would actually hit me, so I ran on. Nothing hit me, but it was quite an adventure. At one point I looked over at the river to discover that it was flowing in the wrong direction.

Funnily enough, it was one of my best training runs ever. I managed to stay pretty strong for the duration and finished strong, which is always a goal. Maybe I should run in tropical depressions more often. It seems to beat running in my temperate depressions.

When I got home, of course, the power was out. It was out for 20 hours. Half of our neighborhood still has no power two days later. All the schools are closed. Etc, etc.