Throughout the week, they’ve been calling for rain today, but it wasn’t clear how much or how strong it would be, so my running group director told us yesterday that he’d email us at 5:30 this morning as to whether or not we’d do our group run today at 8:00. I woke up around 6:45 to check my email and found that we weren’t going to do our group run – bonus sleeping time! I woke back up around 8:00 to some major thunder outside, so I think he definitely made the right call about not having us out there running around in the storm.
Around 10:00, I had been checking the weather and it was barely sprinkling outside and it looked like I had about 2 hours to run before the next wave of major storms came through Charlotte, so I grabbed my rain jacket and headed out the door. I made it about a mile before I was getting too hot – it was in the mid-50’s no rain, super humid and a peek of the sun coming out every once in awhile. I was supposed to do 10 miles today, so I figured it’d make it a test run for another run I have planned in April – on my 23 mile week, there is a half marathon (that my running group is training for), so the group director suggested that I run 5 miles before the race, do the half marathon and then run another 5 miles. The start line isn’t very far from my house, so I figured I might be able to run to and from the race – this will give me crowd support through some of the tough miles and I have to get home somehow, so it would certainly be motivation to keep going!
So today, I went out to see exactly how far it was from my house to the race start. There’s a couple different ways to get there, so I figured I’d go out one way and then come back the other way to compare distance. Originally, I thought the first way I decided to go would be much longer than I wanted it to, but it only took me about 4 miles to get to the approximate start line and then about 3 miles to get back taking the other way. Good information to have, but I still needed to get another 3 miles done, so I decided to head towards the big hill near my house and do a loop around that so that I could get up to 10 and for my 23 miler I would just have to look at the maps some more to figure out how I could add those extra 3 miles in to my out and back loop to the race… and this is where things got interesting!
Right around 7 miles, it started to sprinkle. No big deal – it actually felt pretty good since it was warmer than I was expecting this morning – so I just stuck with my plan to head to the big hill. About .2 miles later, I looked up (I had to keep my head down because it had been getting pretty windy since about mile 5) and I could see the waves of rain headed my way. I was able to get my rain jacket out of my water belt and start to put it on when the downpour started… and this is when I turned around! Luckily, I was only about a half mile from home, so I picked up the pace and got home as fast as I could. Soaked to the bone after about a minute, I decided that I didn’t really need to dodge the puddles anymore, so I just ran through them!
Mile 1 – 10:53
Mile 2 – 11:53
Mile 3 – 11:27
Mile 4 – 11:22
Mile 5 – 11:20
Mile 6 – 11:00
Mile 7 – 11:25
Last .62 – 10:29
Lesson learned: don’t trust weather predictions! I’m glad I was able to at least get the mileage in I that I did, but I was definitely hoping to get to 10. I may add in a few more miles tomorrow to make up for it.
How do you feel about running in the rain?
