The worst it will ever be.

I went for a little run on Tuesday that should have felt great - it was unseasonably warm, I was wearing a great outfit, and I’d had a few days of rest followed by a 4 miler Monday, so 7.5 after school didn’t seem like a big deal.

Except I ate a really huge Granny Smith apple and some Greek yog and went running ALMOST IMMEDIATELY afterwards.  Dumb.

I’ve trained my stomach up pretty good, but it was just a lot of food to have on board and I felt a little queasy during the run.  Of course, my melodramatic running brain was like, “This is disgusting!  I’ve never felt so sick during a run before!  I HATE feeling sick to my stomach - can I even continue?  Should I walk?”

I didn’t walk, because I need to learn to handle issues on the run, and I also remembered that I have felt much worse than this before; in fact, that I had felt the worst I would ever feel (gastrointestinally) during my first 50-miler, which resulted in an unpleasant and time-consuming stop in the woods.  I could and did handle that; a little apples-and-Greek-yog indiscretion was not going to stop me.  

It reminded me of something my friend Jon told me once after a really crummy run.  I’d done a road 30-miler (for training,  on purpose), and it was hours and hours of pouring rain and cold on the side of busy county roads.  It stopped raining long enough for me to dry off, and then started raining again, then thunderstorming, then hailing.  The day culminated with me cowering under some shrubbery, covering my head with my hands to protect myself from painful hailstones as lightning strikes threw down around me.  It was scary, lonely, and cold.  And Jon said, “At least you know that’s the worst it will ever be.”

There’s something to that.