Tag Archives: Mini-marathon

Asthma

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So, we promised to get back to the subject of Eyegirl needing an asthma inhaler.

Until the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon, she didn’t. Everything went well throughout the race. As usual, I was excited at the beginning and wanted to run fast, but Eyegirl was smart and paced herself. By 10-13 miles, I was dragging my butt along and she was doing fine and checking to make sure I was OK.

For the last half mile, awesome motivational rock music was playing over the speakers and tons of people were watching from the sidelines. I probably looked like a huge idiot playing air guitar as we strolled along the last stretch. As you can see from the picture, we crossed the finish line feeling pretty good! (Despite all the other states of emotion you can see in the picture. By the way, our actual time was under 3 hours, but as you can see our gun time was longer as it took us almost a half hour to get through the huge crowd at the starting line.)

As we started walking, I was looking around for the snacks and water, but thankfully one of our amazing US soldiers standing at the finish line noticed that Eyegirl was in distress, struggling to take deep breaths. He ushered her to the medical tent even though she wasn’t sure what was happening.

Fortunately, after about 30 minutes of water, rest, and albuterol treatments, she was back to normal. “You should go tell that soldier thanks for noticing I was in trouble,” she said, “I probably wouldn’t have realized I needed to go to the medical tent on my own.” So I did and he seemed to appreciate hearing back from us.  Not to get too off topic, but we are so grateful for our service men and women and encourage you to show them at every chance you get!

In the following weeks, her primary care doctor prescribed a personal albuterol inhaler to use before exercise, especially when it’s cold outside. Being new to this stuff, we are dummies and frequently forget to bring it.

Fast forward to last month. Eyegirl got a surprise day off from work and was able to run a 5K race with me as part of an event for my work. The fastest runner for each age group scores points for the company’s team, so I had the bright idea that we would split up and I would run as fast as I could to try to score the most points for our team. In the sense, the plan worked, since I ran my fastest 5K yet (26:25). However, in another sense, it didn’t work:

I was cooking along, somewhere around the 2.5 mile mark, where the course looped back on itself. This is great, I thought, I am really going fast and Eyegirl is probably right behind me. When I turn the corner, I will cheer her on big-time! I turned the corner and started scanning the crowd coming the other way: girl in pink…shirtless guy…a group of guys in skin-tight orange bodysuits… hmm, weird but don’t see Eyegirl yet – keep looking. There she is! “Alright, nice work!” I yelled.

But she didn’t smile. Instead, she pinched her fingers in front of her face. Yeah, it is smelly downtown. For some reason, there is often a sewage smell when you are down-wind around here. I kept running.

Strange, we’ve talked about that before, why would she feel the need to signal me regarding the sewage smell? By now, we had crossed paths and were out of each others’ sight.

Oh no, was she signaling that she needs her ashtma inhaler? It wasn’t really a nose pinch, but sort of a general pinch in front of the face. More up and down than side to side.  Crap! Should I turn around? I was nearing the finish line. What do I do? I know, I’ll scout the location of the medical tent and then watch for her to cross and take her there. Should I go tell them to get an inhaler ready?

It felt like forever watching the crowd come across the finish line. I hope she didn’t collapse out on the course! At least there were a lot of people around. But sure enough, she came blazing across the finish line. I waved her down, “Do you need your inhaler?”

She nodded and off we went to the medical tent.

After everything was all better, she told me, “I knew if I signaled, you would scout out the location of the medical tent and be waiting to take me there.”

“Oh good, that worked out well then. I thought I was just panicking.”

Sometimes we’re really on the same page.

The race that almost wasn’t, part 2

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Race report, part 2 (probably not as exciting as part 1)

So, despite the garage door trying it’s best to prevent us from getting to the race, we made it on time to the start line and even had a few minutes to stretch and get loosened up. “I can’t believe we made it,” I said with a hoarse voice from the Tarzan-yelling.

Eyegirl took a puff from her asthma inhaler and we put it in my cycling jersey rear pocket. I think it was actually a great choice to wear the cycling jersey. Maybe I looked like a dummy, but I hardly noticed having the inhaler in there, compared to my shorts pocket, where I am always worried things will fall out.

We agreed in advance to walk the first mile, especially since a good warm up is supposed to be helpful in preventing an asthma attack. (We are new to this asthma stuff, and need to soon write about the story of how we discovered it.) It’s tempting to start running at the beginning of a race, especially when everyone is buzzing past you, but the more experience we have accumulated with running, the more we are starting to realize that a little bit of walking doesn’t seem to affect your overall time that much.

So, we crossed the first mile marker somewhere around 15 minutes and started at our usual jogging pace. The weather was pretty much ideal, we thought and the scenery was nice, lots of leaves changing color and the course snakes through the State Park. One thing that we both found frustrating though about the route was that in a number of places, the course loops back on itself, so you see the runners ahead of you coming back for a long time and not sure when the turn around is going to happen. On the plus side, this did mean that we got to see the leaders blazing by at their insane 5 minute pace.

Anyhow, we plugged along, mostly with my bum dragging behind Eyegirl at least a few steps. (My pre-race prediction was that I would start strong, feeling good and wanting to run faster, and then somewhere around the middle, I would be dragging and Eyegirl would be just getting into high gear. Pretty much came true.) I was worried because we had forgotten the energy chews in the scramble to leave, and the banana smoothie was the only thing she had to eat. But of course, she is a champ and blasted through the race, proving you don’t need much special equipment to get it done.

Normally it bothers me a little that endurance athletes use the term “suffering,” especially cyclists, to describe what they are doing. After all, we run and ride our bikes for fun. But for this race, I really did feel like I needed to gather up some willpower to keep going through miles 10-13. (Maybe because we didn’t train nearly enough on the longer distances.) For the last mile, I kept wondering, where is the finish line?

We eventually saw it, and crossed with our best half marathon time yet, 2:36:40, still not too speedy compared to some of you folks out there, but about 5 minutes faster than our previous attempt! Another reason the cycling jersey came in handy: Normally when we finish a race, I grab a banana, granola bar, and water, then realize after it’s too late that I wish I had picked up some more snacks. This time, especially since Eyegirl had not had too much to eat, I grabbed a bunch of things and put them in my pockets. This worked out great, since I mentioned that I had also forgotten my wallet and we were going to have to make it home before we could get some lunch.

Thanks to all of the volunteers who helped with this race!

Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures from the race itself (forgot the camera in the scramble), but here is an “after” picture:

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The race that almost wasn’t

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As we mentioned before, this weekend was our 3rd half marathon, and some foot problems were threatening to keep us from completing it. As it turned out, however, foot problems were pretty insignificant compared to the thing that actually nearly prevented us from completing it.

This is our race report!

We did everything right. The race was scheduled for 8:30. We got up early. I fed the cats at 5:30, had some breakfast with a pretty good mixture of protein and carbohydrates, packed a Clif bar for the ride to the race and a protein bar for afterwards. The paperwork from the race said that we should arrive at 7:30 (which I thought was probably overkill, but OK). It was about a 35 minute drive away. We figured if we left a little after 7:00 it should be OK.

I made banana smoothies. I asked Eyegirl what I should wear. The temperature was about 48 and supposed to reach almost 60 with wind by the time we would finish the race. She has just bought me a new Under Armour base layer turtleneck for my birthday, so I thought it would be perfect. I tried a few T-shirts to go over it, but eventually asked her, “Would it be weird to wear a cycling jersey? It would be nice to have the back pockets for your asthma inhaler and to put our gloves and sunglasses in.”

“Go for it,” she said. I thought the zipper might also be good to help cool off. We got our sunglasses and cold-weather gloves. Eyegirl packed her asthma inhaler and handed me some energy chews to carry during the run (in my handy back pockets!).

We got into the car at about 7:15. I started the engine and looked in the rear view mirror.

That’s weird, I thought, I forgot to open the garage door. I usually open it before I get in the car. I pressed the button on the remote control. It went up a few inches and came back down. Hmm I’d better turn off the engine, we’re sitting in a running car with the garage door closed!

I got out and pressed the switch on the wall. Again it went up a few inches, and now I realized: The piece of wood that anchors the opener to the front wall had spontaneously ripped itself out of the wall and was hanging down in the path of the garage door with all of the nails sticking out. We disengaged the automatic opener, but because the wood was blocking the path of the door, it couldn’t be opened more than a foot, even manually.

Trying to remain calm, we got the power drill and some deck screws. “I’m going to try to lift it back into position and screw it in,” I told Eyegirl. I tugged at the wood, but couldn’t budge it enough and operate the drill at the same time. She got a kitchen chair and climbed up to help me, but even together we couldn’t combine the strength to lift it up with the dexterity of operating the drill at the same time. I let out a sort of Tarzan-like yell trying to put all of my strength into it.

We regrouped. It was 7:45, getting late. Could we disassemble it? Take out all of the bolts so that the wood wouldn’t be bearing the weight of the whole assembly? Not knowing much about garage doors, we couldn’t imagine a scenario that might not result in some high-tension spring popping into our eyes.

I was unbelievably angry. We were more prepared than ever and a stupid little piece of wood was preventing us from being able to get out of our house. If Eyegirl had said she wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to do it, I would have been bummed but understood. But here we were, standing in our full race gear, already attached our shoe timing tags and pinned on our bib numbers (even relatively straight!). We had applied anti-chafing products for crying out loud! We both wanted to go, but we couldn’t get our car out of the garage!

If only we had parked in the driveway instead! Could we call one of our friends and ask to borrow their car? It was 7:55. We started to resign that we would miss the race. Even if we left right now, there might not be enough time to find a parking space and get to the starting line, especially since they warned us to be there at 7:30.

Eyegirl called a cab service. It might be a 20 minute wait to pick us up. “Forget it,” I said.

I went back to take one more look at it. There has to be a way to move this thing! I climbed up again to give it another tug (and another Tarzan-yell). It budged, it was pretty close! Eyegirl climbed up again and helped. Together, we mustered the strength to lift it back into position. It seemed that its own weight would hold it roughly in place, but as if enough hadn’t gone wrong. . .

The motor started running again! Maybe because it was now back in appropriate position, or maybe just to mess with us, the chain started moving. Eyegirl let out a yelp – her hand had been pinched somewhere in the process! Imagining the worst, I ran to cut the power to the device, something I should have thought of as step 1. Luckily it just a minor pinch, but we are dummies and should not be operating machinery before 8:00 AM.

I got the deck screws again and drilled in a few. They just barely went through the first piece of wood, Eyegirl told me, but hopefully it would hold enough to get the car out.

I lifted the door up and she pulled the car out. I grabbed a few things, closed the door, and hopped in. It was 8:05. We started driving and took stock of what we had. The most important stuff was there: Asthma inhaler – yep, bibs, timing tags – good. Almost everything else was forgotten in the hustle. Wallet – nope, gloves – took them off to work on the door, sunglasses – put them down when we thought we weren’t going to make it, ear muffs – ditto, energy chews – forgotten.

The GPS said that we would be there a few minutes before 8:30. We weren’t sure whether to believe it, but we crossed our fingers. “Hopefully we’ll at least be able to run to the start line in time to be counted!” I said.

We must have had all the luck with traffic, because we made it to the parking lot, jogged a little to the starting line, and were standing in our corral before the national anthem.

“I can’t believe we made it,” We said, both laughing at each other. My new base layer turtle neck had black spring marks on the sleeves and our hands were covered in grease.

Tune in tomorrow for part 2 – the actual race!

(In the scramble, I didn’t take a “before” picture, but here is the piece of wood propped back close to its original place. If you can imagine when it had fallen down, the bottom of it was overlapping the top edge of the door so that it couldn’t be opened.)

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