Oy, with the rain already. Today's team run was another very wet one. Coach Ethan had printed out little slips of paper with our route on it, and gave each of us a Ziploc baggie to carry them in so that they wouldn't be rendered soggy and illegible by the rain.

The course took us pretty much all over Ann Arbor, and was 13.98 miles. That's 53% of a marathon! It included a couple of big hills, which felt easier than the last time we did big hills, and overall went smoothly. I had to ditch my glasses again for most of the run because of the rain, and was lucky to be running with a non-blind teammate because without my glasses, I can't even come close to reading street signs. So, teammate Mandy served as navigator and made sure I didn't bump into things or fall in any holes, which was very kind of her! Silly rain, silly glasses.

The last 3 or 4 miles were pretty tough for me -- legs were very tired by then and I had a bit of a side cramp. I kept getting slower and slower... and slower... but I didn't stop to walk! The whole thing took me a little over 2.5 hours, including a couple of brief refueling stops.

On the way back from the run, I stopped at Meijer to get a couple bags of ice so that I could take an ice bath. Ice baths are sort of a rite of passage for runners, I've learned; they're supposed to prevent inflammation after a long run, thereby promoting recovery and reducing post-run pain. Jenne has sworn by them ever since I've known her, but I couldn't bring myself to do it until now. Procedure: dump ice in bathtub and fill with cold water until hip-deep. Get bundled up in a sweatshirt, make a cup of hot tea, undress from the waist down. Get in bath, scream and yell expletives that you may not even have realized were in your vocabulary, until about 3 minutes have passed and the extreme pain finally gives way to a chilly numbness. Sit there for as long as you can bear, shaking and sipping tea and reading a book to try to distract yourself from the fact that you are sitting in a tub of ice water. In my case, I had set the timer for 15 minutes, but realized a couple minutes into my bath that the timer was on the fritz, so I had to estimate; I think I was in there for between 10 and 15 minutes, and then I just couldn't take it anymore. My legs are still in the process of thawing as I type this. We'll see whether it was worth it...