Endurance 50

I'm starting to feel like life is maybe under control -- the dishes are clean, I'm able to read a few pages a night, Speedy sleeps for longer than 2 hours at a time and feeds himself solid food... Soon the ground will freeze, plants will die, and my work will slow down for a couple months. Maybe I'll be able to post more now.

The Swadfather is running some portion of the Boston Marathon course with Dean Karnazes tomorrow as part of his Endurance 50 series. Speedy & I will be setting up shop on the back of the Black Sheep (my truck, so called because it's the only one in the fleet that's not white) to hand out fruit slices & water along the route. I'm excited, but I don't know whether to hope that the Swadfather finishes or sags, as he hasn't been training. I think both of us take endurance events with a grain of salt now that we're working parents. I mean, Dean's totally inspiring and crazy, but he also has a high-power job, endorsements, and a nanny for his kids.
Last weekend, Swad & I both ran totally unprepared, and did OK. Saturday, we ran the Somerville Homeless Coalition 5K -- Swad with a time of 27 min unladen, and me in 32:29 with a sleeping Speedy in BOB. While 10:27 miles are no PR, it was substantially faster and easier than the 13-minute miles I did last year. Of course, I was 8 months pregnant at the time, and my lungs were squished somewhere up around my ears... It was cool to come full-circle and run the same race with Speedy outside instead of inside. And I passed the same lady I passed last year, only this time I had the baby-jogger, and she was unladen!

Monday, I did the 30th annual Tufts 10K, an all women's race which I've done almost every year since I've lived in the Boston area. Finished in 1:03:27, which felt pretty good, given that my goal had just been to run the whole thing.

Running an all-women's race can be really powerful. About 8,000 women run, and many are first-timers, so the start can be a bit chaotic. You have to seed yourself optimistically, because a lot of the folks are up with 7-minute milers and plan to walk and talk the whole way. I wasted a lot of energy 2 years ago trying to break through the pack for the first mile. Anyway, when we were lined up and waiting around, the announcer was calling for various groups of women to raise their hands: sisters, aunts, mothers, etc. Lately when I've been close to hitting the wall on a run, I think about labor and delivery, and how much pain and effort my body can handle. So, when I my calves started cramping and planter fasciae were screaming in mile 4, I looked around me, remembered that approximately 1/3 of the crowd had raised their hands as mothers, and got all teary at the raw power that was surrounding me. I was on adrenaline for the last mile, and sprinted in to "Meet Virginia" on the iPod as we rounded the Common.