The Hero Takes a Fall

Today's long run was later in the day than normal on the weekend, but mission accomplished. The weather was gorgeous today, and if we hadn't had a birthday party in the morning I would have been out earlier. Even with all that motivation there were a few times where I contemplated cutting the run short, but I stuck with it. I was wearing a shirt from the '07 KC Marathon that has the word 'FINISHER' in big block letters on the back. I kept thinking of that during the last half of my 11-mile run and it helped me get 'er done. Too many thoughts of hey, it's only a half-marathon you're training for, so go ahead and cut it short. You only need to do long runs of 8 or 9 miles, so no big deal. Too bad, I want to keep my training level fairly high for a marathon later in the year, and I'm a finisher.

The gratuitous Bangles reference in the title for this post has to do with, you guessed it, a fall. I can't remember the last time, if ever, that I've fallen while running. It happened before I'd even run a full mile. I passed a lady getting into her SUV in the back part of the neighborhood, and I knew she'd be coming up behind me. She did, and as I turned the corner onto another street I was concentrating on staying close to the curb. Just as she passed me my right foot caught in the one of the shoelace loops of my left foot and I went down. Not too hard, and I hit with my right knee and did a roll and hopped right up, continuing almost without missing a stride. Not sure if she saw me go down, but she certainly didn't even tap the brakes so I have my doubts. I wasn't hurt and clearly kept running to finish out the day.

I just plugged in the Garmin to see if the fall registered on the graph it produces, and sure enough there's a little spike in the pace line at that spot in the run. The wife thinks it's kind of funny, and I have to agree.

Speaking of the Garmin, it's still working great. My thought is that its memory was full. I'm not sure how much memory is in these things, but thinking of all the runs where I've used it in the past year brings to mind how much data must have been stored on it. All the waypoints for every run where the GPS was tracking, my custom workouts, the pace, the elevation, etc., were stored, and I can only imagine how much space that takes up. Thank God for the Internet since otherwise I would have most likely considered it completely dead. Seems appropriate that my Garmin was resurrected during Easter week!