Running the track in the light of the moon...

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

What’s it been…four weeks since something went wrong with one of the cars? Gotta’ be…and so I was overdue. The Honda had been fine all day and I’d been parked down at Mimi’s for the past couple of hours while I was doing some painting on her porch. I finished and did the short drive back to the house with time to get in a workout. I pulled into the garage and turned off the engine. I could hear what sounded like a big wheel kid’s toy on cement and got out of the car looking in the driveway for just such an item. There wasn’t one…but the noise…which I now identified as coming from the front of the Honda…was still there. I walked to the front of the car and was dismayed to discover that the noise was coming from under the hood and was the gurgling of hot fluids bubbling in the radiator overflow. Well…poop.

Naturally, I called Dan and described the situation. He walked me through some process of elimination things…like making sure the electric fan; designed to cool the radiator…was kicking on when the engine began to heat up. It was. He had me checking for leaks and the rigidity of hoses…stuff like that…and then had me put some fluid in the radiator and let it run to see what happened. What happened was it fixed itself…though I’m not completely convinced even after taking a ride out to his place just to make sure.

Of course I stayed out there until after dark, talking ‘Paleo’ diet and survival workouts…interesting stuff like that. As I was driving back, I called Holly and asked her to meet me in the park for a moonlight hike. She declined the offer, so I decided I’d just go there and do a run on the bridle paths. When I arrived there and turned off my headlights and peered down the trail…which was darker than the inside of my shoe…I decided running trails wasn’t such a good idea after all. I had one option left…the Mayfield track.

I’d forgotten just how great it can be to run a track with only the light from a clear night sky to guide you. I’d done some workouts there last summer when I’d been training for the Adirondacks and had been climbing the bleachers with a 60-pound pack on my back. This night though, was just for running. I put in four and a half miles in 36 minutes (Kim runs six miles on the track in that time) and truly enjoyed getting lost in my thoughts. There are few external distractions when you’re running in the dark and it’s a wonderful time to think. I don’t think I could have put in the mileage nearly so easily if it had been daylight…and I won’t know because I’m not going to try. By the time I finished, it was almost 11 p.m. and I was so pleased with myself for rediscovering the track at night and getting in a workout when things seemed to be stacked against me and doing nothing was such a real possibility.

Run duration: 36 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 145 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 615.