She Warmed Up. She Started. And By God, She Finished.
She also managed to prove that the bigger you are, the harder you fall. As a kid, it would’ve been minor, a skinned knee, a skinned hand, a lot of dramatic sniveling, and then Mommy would kiss it and make it all better.
When you are twenty-five years old, however, and forget that in order to overcome massive obstacles like a crumbling curb, you need to pick up your feet, it’s major. You’ve got that much further to fall! Ooops.
This year’s Bolder Boulder was definitely better than last year in terms of time (I think), quality, feeling in general, etc. Jack came out to cheer me on at the intersection near our apartment complex where the race passes through. I gave him a quick high-five and felt an incredible sense of warmth and love and happiness. That he’d get out of bed at 7:30 in the morning and stand there waiting for me to pass meant the world to me. It so warmed my heart that the permasmile I slap on when I’m running a race, workout, anything, was even bigger than usual. At the advice of one of my favorite triathletes, the 2006 World Long Distance Champion Bella Comerford, I try to remember to “stay tough, and keep smiling”, as she wrote to me in an email before the marathon last year. And so I stayed tough. And kept smiling. Even through the fall.
About a mile or so from where Jack and I had slapped hands (he stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, smirking cutely and shaking his head, then reached his hand out once I extended mine…I later found out he was only semi-conscious; just goes to show how euphoric the runner’s high really is…you can mistake a friend’s expression, which is really brought on by his being in a state of half-awake, half-asleep, for perfectly-placed mischievousness) I was running up 20th Street when my brain apparently lost touch with my basic running skills and I fell. I tripped on a section of crumbling curb and went straight down, solidly skinning both knees and my left hand. The residents gathered in the yard in front of which I fell immediately started towards me, but I sprang up too quickly, brushing myself off and announcing to them, the other spectators, the volunteers, and about 200 of my fellow BolderBoulderites that I was okay, I was fine, no big deal, just a stupid mistake. Every volunteer after that, it seemed, asked if I needed help. My fellow runners expressed concern here and there. Basically, anyone who’d either seen me fall or saw the results of it. Aside from being profusely embarrassed I was constantly reminded of it. But stopping the race? Hell, no! It was a couple of scratches, minor abrading, no big deal. I finished. Legs stretched out mightily from the top of Folsom thru the chutes at the finish, I suddenly realized that a) I was selling myself WAY short on capacity in terms of what I was able to do, and would therefore have to work on improving my cowardly baby steps to becoming faster and faster, and b) now that I was finished, I could probably use some medical assistance. I walked over to a paramedic I saw and asked for a band-aid. He eyed me warily, then nearly jumped when I showed him my knees and hustled me over to the medical tent. Sidenote: I am so grateful that the only time, thus far, knock on wood, that I’ve had to visit the medical tent was for severely abraded knees and a skinned palm, nothing more serious. A woman came up with her daughter and the girl was suffering severe dehydration; she was pale-grey colored and visibly shaking. They were laying her down to rest and giving her water as the paramedic who worked on me finished iodining and bandaging my knees and hand. At that point, I had glanced at my injuries a few times but was more interested in scanning the crowd for signs of my friends and figured I’d let the medic do his job.
When I got home, however, and undressed to shower, it was an entirely different story. My hand was pretty okay, just a couple of nicks, and my right knee was slightly-to-moderately abraded. My left knee, however, which I’m assuming took the brunt of the fall (I barely remember falling, just one second running along fine smiling and the next second feeling the unmistakable sensation of road-and-crumbled-concrete-and-sand-and-gravel against skin, and then jumping to my feet again and starting to run), has a NASTY goose egg on it and a substantial abrasion. Now I know why so many cyclists shave their legs. The cut is not pretty for sure, but it’s the horrible bruising that I’m really worried about. Oooops…
And I will write more later, as I am exhausted and a little cranky. Mostly just tired, but I need some fluid replenishment myself and I want to see what goodies are in my BolderBoulder bag this year…they’ve been getting progressively worse over the last four years, for sure. Sidenote: why is it that the sunscreen companies can create sunscreen that won’t get in your eyes but will invariably get in your mouth? I’ve Listerine’d twice now and still can’t get that detestable taste from my mouth….eeeewwwwww…
Several days later…
Well, my cardiovascular system may have recovered from the 10K but my knees are just starting to mend. Along with nasty scrapes on each one I’ve got some terrific bruising going on, especially on the left one. I found out my time was one hour, twelve minutes and fifty-four seconds…two days after the run, when they collected data from everyone’s electronic shoe tag and posted it all to the website and got it up and running—no pun intended—as 50,000-plus users tried to access it all at once. When Seagate can’t keep a website up…well, just goes to show what happens when you have a few score-thousand people trying to login to it. I exchanged a few entertaining emails with my friend Gregory who’d also run the race with his fiancé and several of their friends, but alas, as much as we cursed and damned the site it didn’t do us any good. Seagate finally got it going yesterday afternoon and I checked my results last night, laughing audibly when they came up and I realized I only did better than last year by about three minutes. Well, a sprinter I’m not, that’s for sure.
The goodies weren’t so bad although “nutritious” would be a stretch…the most nutritious item in the bag was, as usual, the produce item, which instead of an orange or apple was a tiny bag of baby carrots this year. I dug into those immediately. The rest of the bag’s contents remain in the bag, on the floor or my living room. As big a fan of junk food as I am, the words “Breakfast” and “Cookie” just don’t go together in my vocabulary.
So, onward and upward…I’ll start running again in a few days, when it doesn’t re-open the scabs on my knees every time I bend them. I’ve been thinking I should attend a Bikram class but then I start thinking about the postures, there are definitely a few that would hurt my abraded joints like hell. And te sweat pouring into them probably wouldn’t help either. So I’m restlessly resting, eager to get moving again, semi-twitchy with a virus only athletes—or those of us struggling to be athletes—get when we can’t train for a few days, general restlessness. But man, what a race. While I understand why the frenzy surrounding the BolderBoulder every year send the rest of my fellow Boulderites packing for a long weekend anywhere BUT here…I don’t have a car, so traffic isn’t a concern. I don’t have to fly in, drive up, find a place to stay…just take off about half an hour before my start time to the starting line, slap on a smile, and enjoy my run.
