I'm not sure...could it be...rain?

Friday, May 13, 2011

Monsoon season wasn’t over…and I knew that, but the day had started out promising and I was thinking I’d be riding a long one after work. I was thinking wrong about that. The first downpour hit around 3 p.m. but by the time I left work, the roads had dried sufficiently to ride…though there was something about the skies…I don’t know exactly…possibly the blackness mixed with bolts of electricity and a rumbling like what my belly does when I haven’t eaten in two hours…that had me thinking it might rain again.

I drove to the park for a run…against my plan for two days in between runs but out of necessity. I thought ‘maybe I’ll run kind of short and then I’ll go home and ride some if it doesn’t rain’…one of those Sundance Kid moments…you know where he tells Butch, “you just keep thinking…that’s what you’re good at.”

Thirty minutes would be plenty…if I could back it up with a bike. I headed down the bridle trail, but when I reached Clear Creek, the water was running so high from the afternoon monsoon, that I would have needed a good moose under me to have forded it. I detoured around…which meant more time and since I had to return the same way, ended up doing forty minutes instead of thirty. The thunder had been rumbling throughout the run, but the rains held off until I was five minutes from the car. It fell heavily when it came and after I completed the run, just walked out into the rugby field with the Canada Geese and let the rains pound into me. Nothing beats a warm, hard rain at the end of…or during…a long, hot run. I let it soak my shirt to the skin and plodded through the puddles in the low spots of the field until my shoes were saturated, as well. I couldn’t have been any wetter if I’d fallen off my moose and landed in Clear Creek and it felt completely refreshing.

Needless to say, I did not ride the bike when I returned home. Nor did I get a chance to cut the grass, which was now pretty much uncut able for the next day, too. My knee seems to be doing well with the every other day routine, but I’m really not comfortable and feel like I’m courting disaster. Hopefully the rains will abate for some period of time tomorrow and allow me to ride.

Run duration: 40 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 140 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 675.