13.1 Miles of Crazy

Today we tackled our 7th half marathon, the 10th Platte Half Marathon. I’ve been training, probably no too religiously, but training nonetheless since January. I’ve done at least 4 runs over 10 miles and two of them were even pretty great and yet, I struggled today.

The race started out well enough. It’s a nice course, pretty similar to one of my favorite training runs, along Clear Creek trail. The weather was mild enough at the start and I was feeling pretty good at the start. However, by mile 4 or 5, it was pretty clear I was not having a good day. Matt said he could hear my breath getting heavy and wheezing. He said the way I was going he thought I’d be lucky to make it to mile 6.

But I soldiered on, not feeling terrible, but not feeling really ON. I was running under 10 minute miles and I was happy with that, but by mile 8, I really couldn’t keep it up. I had to walk for 30 seconds here and there (something I try to NEVER do) just to catch my breath and I felt pretty darn terrible. It was frustrating, because my muscles and joints were perfectly fine, but my lungs just didn’t want to do their thing.

Sometime around that point, the weather turned pretty cruddy. It had clouded over and gotten a little colder and breezy, but then the wind got serious and it started raining a little. The wind was the worst though. At one point, the gust was so bad that I felt like I was running about double just to keep going forward. It was really not what I needed at that point. There is a massive hill at the end (about the last .9 miles) that is pretty soul-crushing if you’re not doing well. But happily, I managed to make it up with only a short break when I couldn’t get through a pack of people. The finish line was a welcome welcome site and my time was not terrible despite how I felt. The Platte has a great post-race-party with some good food and a fun atmosphere, but we had to skip it. The line was looooooong and the weather was freezy. I was sorry to miss it, but the warm car was very nice.

Now I have to figure out what’s going on with the lungs. My good friend, H, a nurse, has suspected for a while that I may have some issues with asthma. It’s not exactly that I didn’t believe her, but my problems have been so hit or miss that I didn’t really want to delve into things. But it seems like this is getting more frequent and worse and I need to face the possibility that I am having issues. I’m really not a fan of doctors, but I’m also not a fan of feeling like crap on long runs.