Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Half Marathon Training Run [in December]

Saturday morning, December 18.

8:30am.

18 degrees (feels like 9).

Sounds like perfect weather for a 10 mile training run.

You may be asking "Why would anyone run ten miles in THAT?"

Well my friends, I'm running a Half Marathon, in less than a month.

Kim S. organized what I believe is Chicago's first half marathon in January last year, affectionately called the "F*cking Freezing Frozen Lake Half Marathon." The race's mascot is none other than our recently-ousted former governor, Blago.

The race proved to be a hit and it's back this January, bigger and better than ever.

Kim has formed a partnership with Universal Sole and is holding training runs from their West Lakeview location.

On this particularly frigid morning, Brian, Kim and I were the only ones who'd shown up for the training run [it turns out other faster runners had shown up earlier and started ahead of us], dressed in our tried and true winter gear. We disembarked from Universal Sole and headed east on Belmont, passing over a few patches of sidewalk with ice. The weather was keeping most indoors on a morning like this, so we weren't fighting crowds as we made our way to the lakefront.

We headed north to Montrose where we then looped and headed south. The wind whipped against us and our faces hurt - the only skin exposed to the elements. Between November and March, the City's water fountains are turned off, so we carried fluids on us. In my case, the water in the bottles of my fuel belt froze.

It was nice to have a trio. We were able to catch up on training and life in general. Anything to take our minds off what we were actually doing - although I will have to say that's a standard practice in running:

While running, discuss anything but. When doing anything else, always discuss running.

No comments: