Grand Canyon Man and The Wild Woman

A year and a half or so ago, before I began this blog, I had an hilarious moment during one of my runs. I was trying to get my pace down to a 3:10 marathon pace and had decided to run that pace every Monday. At that time my weekday runs topped out at 5 miles so I used a zig zag route through my neighborhood. Twice I passed a woman out running going opposite directions and the second time we acknowledged each other with a nod. As I was nearing the 4 mile mark, I was really struggling to hold pace but saw that she was going my direction now up ahead. When I was about 50 yards behind her, she started running like hell and yelling something. It took a moment to realize she was saying that she was not going to let me catch her. So there we were, a forty something woman being "chased" through the neighborhood by a forty something man at 7am in a light rain and she's hollering at the top of her lungs that she won't let me catch her! I nearly had to stop I was laughing so hard. A week or so later, I saw her again and we stopped to introduce ourselves. Her name is Marcella but I can never remember that, thinking of her as the Wild Woman in the hood.

Today, I ran past Grand Canyon Man. I think his name is Lawrence and he walks around the neighborhood with a 40 pound pack in preparation for hiking the Grand Canyon this fall. I've stopped to talk to him before but found him hard to get talking. I'm finding it quite fun to get to know all of the interesting characters around here.

As for the run today, I am now really experimenting with my nutrition/hydration. I have previously worked up to 6oz of Carbo-Pro prior to running. Since I had problems on Saturday and I drank a few oz of water during the run, I thought I should start figuring out the cause. Is it caused by drinking after I have been running, or is it what I'm drinking that causes the problem. So, today I mixed my 6oz of Carbo-Pro and drank half. Then I carried the rest in a flask and drank 1 oz at mile 3, 5 and 7. I had no problems. During the last 1/4 mile I had some sensations in my gut that could have been the beginning of something but the run was over before it got bad. To test out this line of study, I'm going to try drinking plain water tomorrow, same quantities and places. Then I will alternate for a few days to see if there is a correlation. Today's run was my usual 10 mile route and I did not wear my watch.