A Scary Run

First off–welcome to those of you who clicked over today from SkinnyRunner. I am not as skinny or as fast as her, but I am also blond and like to run, so there’s that. And I also like compression socks. I didn’t believe in them until last summer when my shins started getting a little splint-y, but now I’m a convert.

So about that scary run. I had big plans of running up to the park this morning and knocking out my five miles of hills before work, but I stayed up late reading Gone Girl (SO GOOD), and it just didn’t happen. Although I’ve mostly converted to a morning runner, it seems I can only manage that two out of the three weekday running days on my schedule. I guess two out of three ain’t bad though.

I left work tonight happy to go tackle my five miles o’hills.

Got it.

While the Chelsea/Flatiron area where I live is awesome for most things, running hills is not one of them, so I headed up to the park. I work off of Fifth Ave, but I knew better than to run up that at 7pm, so I ran up Madison and caught this lovely view.

Oh hello Chrysler Building.

I was having a great run until I got to the park. I felt good and I was actually having fun dodging people left and right. Sometimes running on NYC streets feels like running in a video game, and I was winning.

I started running up that little path that takes you from the southwest corner of the park onto the main loop, and that was when I started feeling crappy. I felt incredibly lightheaded all of a sudden. I told myself to run up until that road hit the main loop. I ran to there and stopped for a minute. I didn’t feel much better but continued on the main path. I probably stopped again once or twice running on the loop and even stopped to walk for a bit.

I didn’t have a full route mapped out when I left, but my loose plan was to cross at one of the transverses and take a smaller loop until I hit 5 miles total. The second I hit 72nd Street, I knew I couldn’t make it much further and turned that way. Halfway across the transverse, I felt AWFUL and stopped to sit down for a minute. I sat and not only did I feel lightheaded, but my legs started shaking–it was really scary. I knew at this point I wasn’t going to make it the 5 miles. I decided to run just to Central Park West so that I could just get out of the park and to a subway quickly. I stopped at CPW and started looking for a Duane Reade to grab a Gatorade. I didn’t find one (?) and grabbed a Vitamin Water from a Subway and sat down for a second. I was still really shaky, but the quick hit of sugar seemed to help a bit.

Well, that sucked. Although you’re not really supposed to “make up” the miles you miss in training, I ended up only 2 miles short today, so I’ll likely just add another mile to another run or two coming up.

Have you ever had an awful, awful run like that? Tell me about your worst run ever.