Running away

Went with a colleague and couple of friends who are in town  Sunday to the Belgrad Forest to run. I still try to run every day, mostly as a stress reliever, and I still hope every time I get on the treadmill that this will be the day that I start to love it, but so far, not so much.

I am at a point, I think, where I don’t totally hate it, but it’s not what I call fun. I have a 10k coming up and until this week I hadn’t done a whole 10k in awhile, so one day this week I totally pushed it. It almost killed me, or at least it felt like it.

The shoulder is still killing me, and for the past month I’ve been on a steroid to try and take down the inflammation and stop the pain. The doctor told me to lay off the physical therapy and all shoulder/arm  exercises, so I started back to doing a combination 60 minutes + 5 minutes cooldown and then 25 minutes + 5 minutes cooldown on treadmill/elliptical. I did this before I started working on the arms and averaged 11-12k a day.

So now I’m able to get back to that, and although I go to the gym almost every day, I still hadn’t cracked the 10k mark until last week. And it was so hard.

And on Sunday, I decided to go and run outside. The races I’ve been doing, of course, are outside, but I run on the treadmill inside, so I figured it would be a good idea to run outside and try to get acclimated to running outside.

The Belgrad Forest is a 5,000 hectare area in Istanbul, and it’s really gorgeous. I’d only been there once before, with a colleague and her dog, but it was in the winter, so it was really nice to see the forest with leaves all around.

There’s a running path, about six kilometers, that goes around a lake, so we headed there early in the morning. By early, I mean around 8, and it was pretty crowded. Turks don’t seem to normally be an early-morning person, but there were already people BBQing and working the picnic tables. I couldn’t believe it.

And I am so not ready for a 10k. Not at all. I ran maybe 3k and walked the rest, albeit at a quick pace. I finished and then went back for two members of the group who were walking. The fourth person in the group ran the whole time – she’s got a quick pace – and kept reaching the finish line and coming back for us. She must have come back four or five times, kind of working the half-life thing. I came back twice and went back to the walkers, so for me I totaled about 10k.

And I was absolutely drenched. I wrung out my shirt and Lord, it was disgusting.

The next 10k is going to be a challenge. I think I am more of a treadmill person, where I can have the AC on as I’m running. It’s pretty humid here, not Florida humid, but close. It’s hot, too. Again, not Florida hot but pretty hell hot, especially considering I spent Saturday on the roof.

Anyway, I laugh every time I sign up for one of these races because I really thought Siem reap would have been a one-and-done but I keep coming back. I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.

I’ve gone one coming up, then I just found out about one here in October. I’m also on for at 14k – and this really is going to test me – in October, so when I signed up for the Bosporus race this year, I went ahead and went for the 15k. I must be crazy.