A few weeks before the race I managed to find myself a running companion. Mark is a fellow hasher out in San Antonio. On a whim, I invited him out to Dallas to run the White Rock Half Marathon with me. He was one of the fastest runners at the hash so if anyone could run this, it was him....and, lucky for me, he agreed. Next thing I know, we're both registered, hotel is booked and I'm in Dallas on a chilly December weekend.
This race was incredible in ways that the San Antonio race couldn't be. The weather was miserable.
At 6:00am we were both up and pinning race numbers on our shirts. It was cloudy and 45 degrees with a 70% chance of rain. Yeah. 70% my ass....lets try 100%...and it was going to get colder during the run as the front blew into town. In spite of this, it never seriously occurred to us to not run anyway. As in, talking about not running was us making jokes about it because we knew quitting wasn't really an option. We hurried out to the rail station and hopped on the first train we saw heading to Fair Park.
The absolute hardest part of that run was having to take off my jacket at the bag check. This left me in only a mesh long sleeve shirt and some tights. The gun went off 45 mins later and off we went. What a crazy race. It began really raining right about the time we hit chip pad and it rained for most of the race. It was beautiful...we went through some nice parts of downtown, got several views of the skyline, went through at least two parks, the trees were colored and it was really just fantastic.
I had intended to pace myself at 10:30 a mile, thinking that the cold weather would help me sustain a faster pace than I had in SA. Well, Mark hung back with me for about the first 7 miles and as it turns out, he ended up pacing me a wee faster than that. By "a wee faster" I mean about 30 seconds faster. No complaints! I ended up finishing nearly 10mins faster than my last race at 2:12:35. That was way better than I'd even hoped for.
Its hard to describe exactly what happened. I relaxed a bit somewhere around mile 3. I could feel my feet again at that point, and my body overall wasn't cold anymore. That being said, I wasn't really warm either. By mile 6 I couldn't feel my hands or my toes...I noticed even my wrists were numb when I went to adjust my garmin and I realized I couldn't feel it on my wrist. Now that was weird.
The most amazing part was that I didn't really care...honestly. I couldn't even help but smile at how amazingly crazy and magical it was. It was liberating and beautiful to see so many people out there doing wonderful things for their bodies. It takes a certain type of person to run in conditions like that and still really enjoy it. I can just remember looking around and seeing truly happy people who were soaking wet in 42 degree weather and happily trotting along and chatting with their buddies or generally enjoying their surroundings. It makes me think that there is a certain divide between true runners and everyone else...not an elitist thing, just a connection of a sort...an understanding that, no, we're actually not crazy, we're just in love with what we're doing.
Mark and I had both brought a change of clothes in anticipation of the bad weather. I was able to change my shirt and put on a jacket but we were both still cold. I remember we were sitting, huddled together, on the train back to the hotel and I was still shaking uncontrollably but we were laughing, joking about the rain, and smiling...
And you know what? I think I'd take a runners high in the shittiest weather possible as opposed to none at all :)
Bring on the next challenge.
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