I’m not sure what it is when I start these new challenges, but apparently me getting violently sick is a prerequisite. These challenges are never as easy as I think they will be…
The day started off fine. I was running the race with Dana Hughes:
and plenty of other people (the starting line was actually around the corner):
Since we had only been training a month, we had a pretty realistic approach to the half marathon. We were going to walk / run it — basically run a bit and walk a bit throughout the race. That strategy went out the door fairly quickly. Dana’s shoes were giving her trouble making it painful to run in them (and she ended the race with some nasty blisters) so we knew we decided that the race would be mainly walking early on. At mile three, we were offered some free bacon:
which I am very thankful that I decided to pass on because it was about a mile later that my intestinal troubles began.
All of a sudden my stomach started cramping and I began to feel sick to my stomach. As we reached the later miles, there were several instances where I thought I was going to throw up, although I did manage to not do so during the race. As Dana’s feet continued to get worse and my stomach issues did the same, the goal quickly became to finish the race in under the 4 hour designated time limit:
While the clock makes it look like we just barely made it, we actually had a bit more time to spare since it took us awhile to make it to the starting line at the beginning of the race. Then end result was that even though my time was slow, it was officially under the limit and I managed to complete the half marathon. And then the fun began…
The Blues Traveller was the band that was playing after the race which is a band I have never seen before and was #2 on my list of 45 things I wanted to do. The problem was that at this point both Dana (feet) and I (stomach) weren’t feeling well to hang around for very long, although we did see them:
We quickly decided that we should head home which was another 3 mile walk (we had not anticipated feeling the way we did when we decided we could walk home after the race). Along the route home, the stomach issues I was having finally hit the point where I was unable to keep everything in my stomach and I gave some bushes in a park some extra nutrition.
When I finally did get back home, I decided that I needed to try and get some sleep. That lasted about an hour when I got up and promptly emptied out everything else that remained in my stomach. It was at this point that the cramping reached it’s high point and I realised that it wasn’t just an upset stomach, but very similar to what had happened to me back in May. A trip to the hospital confirmed this and now I get to go through a whole battery of tests again to see if they can figure out this time what is wrong (since they were unable to determine it last time)
The end results were that technically I completed 2 of the 45 numbers on my list (#2 and #5), they were definitely not completed in the way that I would have liked to have done them. I’m thinking that either the Las Vegas Rock and Roll marathon (December 5) or the New Orleans Rock and Roll marathon (February 13) may be added to the list so that I can have a more positive feeling on the completion of one of these…