Race Day

Today was the day of the Lawrence Half Marathon. As you might remember, on Chad's birthday I mentioned that he was in training to participate in this event, which would be his first race longer than a 5K. Nine weeks ago around his birthday he was already running 7 miles on the weekend, and even though he was only running 2-3 times a week because of a sore knee and bad weather, he increased his mileage every weekend. Then came the Shamrock Shuffle in early March. This 5K was on the river levee in Lawrence, where the ground was not only extremely hard and frozen, but also very uneven, completely with bike tire ruts and lots of holes. The terrain was so rough, by the end of the race Chad had a sore foot and knee that hurt even more than normal. He completed his next couple of weekend long runs of 12 and 13 miles, but his knee pain got so bad he struggled on those last few miles. It didn't help that after we won the Davidson game I went running across the room and jumped into my husband's arms unexpectedly, buckling his already sore knee. He decided to taper off the running a little earlier than normal to give his knee some time to heal, so he ran very little during the last 4 weeks, hoping that his knee would be better by race day.

Unfortunately, on Wednesday Chad came home from an out of town business trip and went to bed early, feeling like he was coming down with a cold. He woke up with a terrible sore throat and stuffed up head, and ended up staying home in bed for the next two days! He still had hopes of getting better by today, but considering he still couldn't breathe very well as of yesterday afternoon, he decided that breathing hard for 13.1 miles wasn't really going to be doable! Apparently, this half marathon just wasn't meant to be.

The good news is that Chad's knee was already hurting before he actually got sick this week. I can't even imagine how infuriating it would have been if he had been injury-free and training hard, only to get sick right before the race. With the double whammy of illness and injury, he didn't feel nearly as bad about not running!