Michelle’s House of Horror

Look who I found on my front porch when I got back from the beach today:

Does this mean that he’s leaving that French woman and moving in with me? What will my husband think?

A few weeks ago, I got motivated to start doing some of my running outdoors. [Yes, I realize that it is now Fall, and that perhaps it would have made more sense to be doing that in the Summer when it was not pouring rain. Shut up.] My motivation came in the form of two half marathons I’m planning to run in April and May. It occurred to me that the half marathons would not be run on treadmills, and that it might behoove me to get used to the act of running with my feet on the ground before then.

My plan of attack is to continue to use the treadmills for most of my training, since I don’t like running in the dark, and to do my longer Saturday runs outside. Of course, this being Oregon in November, this involves rain. Which hasn’t actually been terrible. I was born here. I’m used to slogging through the rain. I did have to buy a few new wardrobe items to make it more palatable, but I like shopping.

Last weekend, I did get a little bit lost during my run, but ran about 6.3 miles and had a pretty good run in spite of the rain.

My second outside run was yesterday. I got up, had my coffee and cereal and headed out the door at 9:00-ish thinking I’d do a 7-8 mile run. I didn’t have a specific target for my run, but I did want to run through a nearby park, take pedestrian bridge across the river and see what the trails on the other side were like. So off I ran in the light but steady rain.

Running down one of the trails at the park, I noticed a group of teenage boys jumping up and down and blocking the trail ahead of me. They were looking down another trail, and kept yelling “woo hoo” and applauding something or someone I never did see. I figured it was just some silly boy behavior, and ran around them. A little way further on, probably 3.5 miles or so from my house, was the pedestrian bridge across the Tualatin River. As I ran across the bridge, I noticed yet another group of teens sitting at the end of the bridge. They appeared to be cheering for me in the same sort of way you’d cheer for someone who needed an unreasonable amount of encouragement for doing something other people can do with little effort. Like the sort of cheering you’d do if a person with only 1 finger who didn’t know the alphabet was typing a report. I sort of felt like I was in the Special Olympics at this point, but hey–any encouragement is fantastic during a run! The girls pointed to a trail that they seemed to think I wouldn’t find without their help. It was the only trail there. I jogged onto it.

After a few minutes, several people passed me going the opposite direction. One of them said to me “keep going, sunshine, you only have about a quarter of a mile left!” I looked a bit puzzled, said “no, I have about 3 or 4 miles left..what’s in a quarter of a mile?” and he laughed and kept walking.

After another 300 or 400 meters, I came to yet another group of cheering teenagers standing under a whole bunch of balloons attached to a big sign with the word “FINISH” on it. As I stayed on the trail that I was on, they yelled at me that I was missing the finished line. I laughed and confessed that my presence on their race course was accidental. Apparently, they all thought I was in the Run for Darfur 5K being put on by some students from Tualatin High. The race had started more than an hour prior to my nearly crossing the finish line, which explained the sort of “give the old lady who just ran a 1:20:00 5K some applause for trying” reaction I’d been getting. [I am admittedly very slow, but I can run at least a 10K in that time. I'm slow, but not a walker!]

I was oddly happy to get the unexpected encouragement after popping into a race accidentally during my run.

But.

I have to admit that I was very glad that there were not any people at the finish trying to give me a hug. It was a very “run, Forrest, run” moment.

Oh, and I ended up running 7.88 miles in all…with a brief walk break in the middle as I tried to work my way through the crowd at the finish line of the race.