Pitfalls

Guess I am in the twilight of my running career – the main event is only two months away now!  Of course this implies I am back in the teeth of a rigorous running program again, capped by long sessions each Saturday.  Trotted nineteen miles this morning, mixing the course up a little.




Still ventured down to Carolina Beach, but headed south on River Road (only other choice is Carolina Beach Road) this morning.  A fun choice, despite encountering a lot more traffic on River Road than expected at 7AM on a weekend.  That’s a relative statement, because this path is relatively barren when compared to the volume of vehicles cruising Carolina Beach Road.  Add the absence of any intersections to cross over and a sweet route indeed.




Ran about the town of Carolina Beach for a bit and then turned back north towards home.  The run had gone quite well, but things started falling apart at mile thirteen when it was time for a snack on the run.  I try to choke down a Clif Bar (or the calorie equivalent thereof) about every six miles to fend off low blood sugar, but when your mouth is dry and you are running this is no easy feat.  I was hopeful this would be a treat today, because I had packed along one of the Hammer Energy Bars Kim gifted me on our anniversary.  She presented me with a wonderful mix of different snacks to spice things up and today’s bar was chocolate flavored (obviously not a genuine chocolate bar, but close enough to provide a wonderful taste sensation for this diabetic!).




Well, trying to unwrap these snacks when you are running and all sweaty is problematic, and when I finally succeeded in partially tearing the bar open I was confronted by a melted mess.  My fingers were now slimed with sweat and chocolate, so naturally my attempt to further unwrap the bar resulted in dropping it into the sandy dirt that lines all the roadways around here --- I could have cried.




Stopping to pluck my poor bar from the sand, I decided to take a walking break and gingerly scrubbed as much crud off of my treat as possible.  Fortunately only the top half got tainted, but it was decidedly a bit crunchy…

A runner’s gotta do what a runner’s gotta do!

At least I was in the home stretch after my disappointing snack and this was the first time I ran over the Snow’s Cut Bridge on the Eastern side, affording splendid new views.  Continued another four miles up Carolina Beach Road and crossed over when traffic eased up, but this coincided with a spot where the median was a bit overgrown.  After thrashing through the weeds I felt a bunch of pricks in my ankle, the usual signal that I had picked up a bunch of stickers (see A Sticker Dilemma  for a full discussion of these evil bastards).




Had to endure the pain until safely navigating to the other side of the road, which takes a while on Carolina Beach Road.  Once across I pulled up, discovering that in addition to six stickers embedded in my ankle was a huge chunk of cactus!  It was pretty well buried in there and I had to get a good grip to remove the green menace.




Hardly death-defying, but there are certain pitfalls to running.  I’m still trying to decide which is worse – a sandy energy bar or getting impaled by cacti…