Prepping for a long run in the rain

I’ve prided myself in being extremely flexible with my Marine Corps Marathon training so far.

I'm running tomorrow, even if it looks like this when I wake up (but let's hope it doesn't!).

Not only did I start my long-run schedule late to accommodate a flareup of an old hip injury in May, I’ve been tackling long runs on weekday mornings to avoid pulling my husband and friends into the juggernaut that is a marathon-training schedule. Not that my life has been completely unaltered by my training: I’ve lobbied for shorter hikes on backpacking trips, like our jaunt through the Shenandoah last weekend. I’m trying to pull off a superhuman feat of fitting a tune-up half-marathon into my life before the race. And I’m planning to tackle my 20-miler for a Saturday, because I just can’t imagine rebounding from that in a way that leads to a productive work day after.

Everything’s been holding up pretty well. Then, along came this week, with the promise of rain into the weekend.

I’ve been planning my 17-miler for tomorrow morning for a couple weeks, with an off-day built in today, a pizza dinner planned for tonight and a massage booked for Friday to work out the kinks that are inevitable after sandwiching a backpacking trip in between a 15-miler and a 17-miler.

So rain or no rain, I’m going tomorrow morning. My Clif gels are out. My route is planned. My massage is booked, and I plan to earn that appointment.

I know: It’s just RAIN. If it rains on race day, I’m not going to skip the race. And really, I’d rather do a long run through a fall drizzle in D.C. than 90-degree heat in Florida, as I did when I trained for the Nashville Country Music Marathon in 2007.

And you know what? If things get really ugly, I can always do my last five-mile loop on the (gulp) treadmill.

As usual, wish me luck!

In other training news: Steve and I got to run with our Pacers Silver Spring running group for the first time since our month of travel in August. It was one of our old standard courses, a 5.6-mile version of the Alaska out-and back route (make it longer by retracing your steps on your way back) but it’s been so long since we’ve gone with the group, it still felt like a novelty. I ran it in just under 45 minutes, which works out to be about eight-minute miles — not what I expected in the least on my sore calves and quads from backpacking! It made me think of a quote that cracked me up recently: “A run is like a relationship; you don’t know how it’s going to go until you get a little bit into it.”