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Sunday, June 16, 2019

Father’s Day…and rain day. 

It had been raining all night and much of the past several days so when my daughter Heidi texted about kayaking, I told her it was out of the question.

‘How about breakfast at Molly Brown’s then?’ she texted back. 

Not a bad alternative.  I ate large and after dropping her off and hanging out indoors for several hours while the rains continued, decided it was time to say ‘screw the rain’ and do something anyways.  My streak of consecutive days was at 14 and I wasn’t going to let wet stop me…though it would alter my mode.  I’d done a 30-mile ride on Friday and a five-mile hike with a 50-pound pack on Saturday, having upped the weight since it’s been a month since I started carrying it again.

I knew from finding roads closed as I’d driven to Heidi’s place earlier that the Cuyahoga River was at record levels and flooding was occurring everywhere.  I packaged up my cellphone in a ziplock bag, put on my running gear, and headed for the Towpath and a trip to the Beaver Marsh and the bridge over Ira Road to get some pics of the flooding.  Once on the Towpath, I didn’t get far before running into a breach by the river of the bank.  The water was flowing at record levels and the Towpath was underwater by several inches.  I took some pictures and decided that walking through ankle deep water towards the marsh was probably not a good idea. 

I continued my run in the opposite direction, splashing through the puddles and enjoying every step.  It was extremely humid and I was sweating buckets, but everything on my body felt fine and I continued to go for thirty minutes.  I’d have to look back in my blog, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t gone that far in over a year.  I’ve now run a couple of times a week for the past three weeks and I’m getting close to moving my runs to every other day before going back to back.  Though I’m pushing the time of individual runs out more than I probably should, I am taking plenty of rest time between runs and it seems to be working.

The rain continued throughout the day and the forecast is for lots more over the rest of the coming week.  I’m planning a photo shoot hike for tonight and hoping to get some interesting shots of the power of raging water. 
Run: 30 minutes.
Hike: 40 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 150 running and 70-90 bpm hiking.
Calories Burned:  750.
Bonus: 12,500 steps