Sunday February 24, 1:17am...

...I awoke in a pool of my own blood.

No, this isn’t opening for an episode of CSI: Maryland. This is how my race day began. On Sunday I was to run in the RRCA Club Challenge 10-Miler.

I had gone to bed early Saturday night, hoping to get a good night’s sleep in before the race. Earlier in the evening we had gone to my son’s pizza party for his basketball team. I had eaten plenty cheesy pizza and drank some pop. Not sure if I’m becoming lactose intolerant or what, but by 1am I had woken up with…issues…that led me to the bathroom. My blood pressure must have been low, and after a while I found myself suddenly getting dizzy and thinking, “Oh, man, I’d better lay down”, but I never got that far, consciously. I awoke in a pool of my own blood. Uh-oh. Now “pool” maybe be overstating it a bit. My “pool” was more like what you’d see if you knocked my daughter’s leaky sippy cup over for about 20 seconds. But I’ll tell ya, in low light levels blood sure does look black on our ceramic tile floor!

My neck was a little sore and I had cut open my head just above my right eyebrow, but otherwise I was feeling a little better. I got myself cleaned up and bandaged up, and tried to go back to sleep. I probably could have used a couple of stitches, but I had a race to run in just under 7 hours! It took a long time for me to finally get back to sleep.

I was out of the house and on my way to Columbia by 6:30am. No one in the house knew what had happened – if Andrea had seen my eye she probably wouldn’t have let me go.

Well, the race went great! Although temps in the upper 20s might seem a bit cold, with little wind and the sun out it was really just perfect. I ran the whole race with my friend, Crista, who also ran MCM with me. The course was fairly hilly, but not too bad.

My original plan was to shoot for going 8 or sub 8 for the first 5 miles, which are somewhat downhill, and then push hard to stay close to 8s on the way back. Crista had planned on going a little slower than that. In light of the circumstances, I chose to run with Crista for at least the first few miles and not worry too much about the time. As it turned out, she was the stronger runner on this day anyway.

We finished in 1:21:22, around an 8:08 pace. Here’s the data from my GPS:
Mile 1 – 8:05
2 – 8:04
3 – 7:53
4 – 8:03
5 – 7:47
6 – 8:33
7 – 8:16
8 – 8:37
9 – 8:16
10 – 7:46