Last Place Runner

My past several runs have either been really great or really just awful.

I’ve also had a lot of trouble sleeping the past many, many weeks.

Wednesday’s group run was 25 minutes, then Thursday was back to 20. Those were both OK, but I woke up around 2 a.m. Friday and never went back to sleep. By the time I was ready for work, I was in tears. My heart was racing, my skin was crawling and, for the grand finale, I fell while I was putting on my shirt. So yesterday was a long, miserable day.

It was a shame, too, because the weather was lovely. It was 55 when I left work last night, but I already knew I’d have to adjust my schedule to make Friday my rest day and do my run today. Rain is in the forecast for the whole weekend, and I told my husband last night that I hoped it would just stay warm and overcast.

I did some reading on my insomnia and found out it may be an easy fix. Several sources said magnesium might help. Apparently magnesium helps shut off your adrenaline, which is obviously all amped up if you run two miles at 6 p.m., then eat dinner, clean the kitchen, do the dishes, start some laundry, and spend the rest of the evening glued to the TV and iPad. I was exhausted last night (and several nights before that, too), but we went out after dinner and bought some magnesium. Usually I fall asleep easily and wake up after a couple of hours. I took magnesium before bed and, although I woke up several times, I was able to go right back to sleep.

I woke up around 5:45 this morning and knew that it was time to get up. I started some laundry and hung around the house until it was light enough to run. The forecast said the rain would start around 10 this morning, but it was 54 degrees at 6:30. I suited up in my running clothes and heart rate monitor and took off.

I tried not to have any expectations for how it would go. I wasn’t worried about distance. I just wanted to do my 25 minutes. Ten minutes, 15 minutes … the run was turning out to be a great run. An easy run. A slow run, sure. But it was one of those runs that made all the “bad” or “hard” runs worth it. I was doing it. I was making every dog in the neighborhood bark, but after six weeks of dodging cars parked on the sidewalks, I can’t say that I cared.

I ran 25 minutes and was still about half a block from home. I walked for a few seconds and decided to run the rest of the way home. It felt so great to start back up running after even just a short break. Easy. Peasy.

Thanksgiving is next week, so the group isn’t meeting Wednesday night to run. Coach said he was going to be at the Square at 7 o’clock in the morning on Thanksgiving if any of us wanted to meet him for what he called an easy run (this is a man who just did a 100-mile run a few weeks ago), and that’s the plan for now. So the next time I run with my group we’ll get our race packets. I can’t believe it. It seemed so far away. By this time two weeks from now, it’ll be over.

Until the 8K I’m doing on Valentines Day.