Gene's Running Journeys and Musings

Well, it's Sunday night and I'm pretty slammed right now from a tough week, a restless and sleepless Saturday night, and challenging half-marathon this morning. The half-marathon's objective wasn't clear... make it a training run or make it a race. It turned into a lot more than just a training run. It became a mental challenge. Yesterday, I did a 31km x-country ski in the -20C weather with bitterly cold windchill rated at -36C. It was an exhausting ski outing where my HRM said I burned about 2000 calories in the 3 hours. I was close to bonking. Then for some reason last night I could barely sleep, my daughter was sick and when I did fall asleep I'd wake up again minutes later. A combination of a sick daughter, nerves about the half-marathon and worries that I'd overdone it during the day were only compounding with the lack of sleep. By morning I was a mess but persevered to drag myself to the start line and do the race. It was another cold morning at -16C, but ...

I recently ordered the Running the Sahara documentary DVD of Ray Zahab, Kevin Lim, and Charlie Engle running the 4500 miles across the Sahara desert from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. I finally watched the DVD over the Christmas holidays. It's an amazing story of three tough as nail guys who ran nearly 80km and sometime more per day over 111 days. To put that into perspective that is two marathons per day. They each went through 100 pairs of shoes. Kevin's shoe size went from a 7.5 to an 8 as his feet swelled from the heat and running. I enjoyed the movie and was inspired by each of them. Charlie the drill seargeant is a guy one may hate in the moment but realize later that his enthusiasm, drive, and how hard he pushes people only makes them better. I completely agreed with the situations that pissed him off and I would be equally pissed... but perhasp not express it the way he did. Charlie and I have a similar history. I just managed to avoid the drugs and found an addic...