View from the Bottom

I ran on Saturday, and kind of a lot. Brandi did me a favor and let me sleep in while she went to class, but I knew it was only a minor reprieve, because the Cincinnati marathon looms and I needed very badly to bump my mileage up to cross that finish line. I might still do the 1/2 (though, as my friend Kevin noted, quoting the comedy of Dave Gorman, one half of success is still considered failure), but I wanted to at least have tried. Pity the skies refused to cooperate. Weather outlook called for rain and snow (!), with a high of about 42 degrees. I ran a marathon in temperatures like that, but not with rain, and it took a lot out of me. Saturday, I intended to run nearly as much with lots less support.

Luckily, as a heart model--an experience I still need to write--I had bought a track suit to keep me some approximation of warm. I wore my hat and gloves, strapped on my iPhone and psyched myself up by loading on Goldfrapp, which most straights hate. Since nobody told me in high school that the Pet Shop Boys, my musical tastes have wandered into a decidedly gay territory. I like early-period Wham. Who cares? I like the beat... and women (specifically my wife). Leave it to the historians to figure that out.

The running path was understandably deserted. I ran pretty slowly, pacing myself. It's so hard when you see a goal like the Hancock building slowly creeping forward in your viewpoint. If you run faster toward it you still don't get there all that fast, and you run the risk of burning yourself out. My landmarks were: Foster Beach, Irving Park, the bridge at Diversey, the North Avenue beach restaurant shaped like a landed boat, the Hancock, Navy Pier, and finally Shedd Aquarium, for a run of about 10.5 miles. But wait! I also had to come back!

At this point, I snapped the above photo and took my first drink of water from one of the few drinking fountains running at this time of year. You might think that running in rain would stop you from sweating, but I had a tough time regulating my temperature across all the zones on my body. Hot hands are the worst, but so are hot legs, sweaty back, matted hair and the chaffing that accompanies any of the above. Wind blew rain in my eyes, so I naturally assumed when I turned around that things would get a lot easier and the wind would blow at my back.

How wrong I was.

It turns out the wind was at my back, but eddies in it blew rain into my face. When I turned around, I got hit with a full blast and realized, uh-oh, this may be a lot harder than I thought. I'd brought my bus pass, cash, ID and keys, so I could always get back the easy way, but that would mean giving up, and I'm terrible at doing that. So I soldiered on. Drinking water chilled me somewhat, so I found that I had to put my had and gloves back on and zip up my jacket fully. I was still cold. I tried to run harder, but at this point, exhaustion was taking its toll. My gloves were soaked and my hands reduced to five-pointed popsicles. My hardest point came at the stretch of concrete pier between Navy Pier and North Avenue. Nothing blocks the wind coming off the lake, so it blows right through you. It felt like a huge cold hand was pushing me backwards. I kept at it, realizing that I needed to focus on the distance runner's method of putting one foot in front of the other, knowing you'll get there eventually.

Somewhere between North Avenue and Irving Park I felt my eyelids getting droopy, a sign of hypothermia. I started looking for places to sit down, maybe rest my legs for a bit. Part of me knew that would be a bad idea, worrying about my legs stiffening. Also, I could have fallen asleep and then I would really have been in trouble. So I soldiered on.

Eventually, alternating between walking and running, I made it to Devon Avenue, only a half mile away from home. There was a 7/11 I planned to stop at to celebrate. I'd been planning my purchases for the last three hours, so it was a great joy to walk inside. I bought a half gallon of orange juice and a banana. It would have been funny to watch me struggle to get my money out of my pockets at this point. My hands were so frozen that I couldn't find the dexterity to push my fingers together, or feel them well enough to know when I was holding money. When I tried to apologize for the wet money--rained, not sweated on--my voice came out in a weird slur, "Shorry," because, unknown to me my face had frozen. I probably should have bought coffee, but knew the cold-fighting properties of vitamin C would come more in handy in the long run.

At my door, I struggled with my house keys. At the start of the run, I had tied them together with a rubber band to keep them from jingling and annoying me. At the end, I didn't have enough dexterity to pull the rubber band off, so I basically bit it off. Sticking the door key in the lock also proved tricky because I didn't have enough strength to turn it. Funny how you take for granted the ability to grasp things between your thumb and forefinger. Luckily, bringing the other hand into play solved that problem. Two more doors and I was inside, amongst the cats and ready for a bath. I shivered through half of it. Our building is kind of quirky in that three units share the same (small) hot water tank for the shower or bath. So if anyone has taken a shower at any point during the day, you're going to run out of hot water. Hot water will run in the sink, dishwasher or kitchen all day long, but in the place where you might actually dip your body it's guaranteed to run out. I usually route around this by putting a big pot of water on the stove, settler-style, then pouring it in the bath after it gets appropriately hot. In that moment, I had a chicken-and-egg problem in that I needed to feel warm enough to get out of the tub to put on the pot to feel warm enough. I got it, eventually, but, geez, somebody needs to get on that.

Post-bath, I enjoyed hot beverages, cats and Battlestar Galactica, season three, on the couch for the next several hours. I figured I deserved the break.