Like a Hurricane

Yesterday morning, when the DC area was feeling the wrath of tropical storm Hanna and while most of you were probably cozy in your beds as the ran drops pelted your windows, I was out at Hains Point at 7:45 am, getting ready for a six mile run. Jim and Colin (the coaches) had emailed us at 5:30pm on Friday with the subject line "TRAINING IS ON FOR SEPTEMBER 6th" in those huge, screaming capital letters. So, when the alarm on my cell phone went off at 7:00 am on Saturday morning, I left my comfy bed, changed reluctantly into spandex running pants, a technical tee (that's supposed to wick water like sweat away from your body) and laced up my running shoes.

By the time Turk and I got out there, the rain and the wind hadn't picked up speed yet, so the warm up lap wasn't terrible. However, by mile 4, the wind and the rain were in an unforgiving mood and we were both soaked. My clothes were heavier and my sneakers squished with every step and at times my right foot went numb but I made it. And the rain, while annoying at times, did help keep me cool.

When we were about half a mile away from our goal, Turk decided she wanted to pick up the pace and sprinted ahead of me (with my blessing). I would like to point out her comments on this blog about it being okay for me to leave HER when I want to sprint ahead. HAH. Despite her doubts, it turns out that she is the fast one :)

As soon as we got to the car, I realized I hadn't brought any towels so we had no choice but to just plop ourselves onto my bare seats, which helped soak up some of the rain. This was fine, except I forgot about my wet seats when I headed out in my jeans later that night and ended up walking around Georgetown with a wet behind.

I'm sure there are a lot of things in life that feel great but terrible at the same time but I don't think anything felt as bad (yet as good) as peeling off my soaking wet, sweaty running pants, the running shirt, my shoes and socks and worst of all (but best of all) the two sports bras I had on.

As cheesy as this sounds, I was thinking of two things that kept me going any time I wanted to stop:
1) John McCain and all his POW buddies and the torture they experienced (this is NOT an endorsement, though)
2) The cancer patients and their friends and family as they go through chemo treatments. It SUCKS and I'm sure any of them would much rather run 6 miles through the rain than deal with months and years of cancer. In fact, I am CERTAIN that if you ask anyone who has watched a family member or a friend battle leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, Hodgkins or ANY form of cancer, they would much rather get up at 5AM any day of the week, under any circumstances, to run 6 miles if it meant that their loved one didn't have to go through the pain of cancer treatments.

Thanks to everyone's donations, I'm just under $300, which leaves me with $3,433 left to go! If you want to contribute, now is a great time!

Also, and this is very important - if you know anyone who you think would want to donate to this great cause, please forward along my emails, the link to my blog or even just the fund raising site. When I was fundraising last year, MANY of my donations came from people who weren't on my email list - friends and family members of my friends and coworkers who have been affected by blood cancer.

My fundraising site: http://pages.teamintraining.org/nca/wdw09/adin

Thanks for all your love and support everyone - thanks for the donations and the text messages asking about training and the emails that you send! It really means a lot!