Maraton de Guayaquil, ECUADOR!

On Thursday night I hosted trivia at an Irish-American bar, and one of the questions I wrote and asked was ¨how many miles/kilometers are in a marathon?¨ and one of the waiters whispered the answer to me, and said ¨because I am a marathoner.¨ We got chatting about running, and he asked if I will be here in Ecuador in October. When I said yes, he got excited and asked me if I plan on running the Guayaquil Marathon in southern Ecuador.

WHAT?!??! I didn´t know there is a marathon in Guayaquil while I will be here! I arrived shortly after the Quito Marathon, and for some reason thought that was it. The waiter said he would give me more information next week, but I looked it up, and it seems awesome! I don´t think I can commit to training for a full marathon while I am busy volunteering and teaching English, but I can definitely train for a half-marathon!

I went for my first training run today...a whopping 21-minute run, which I would say is a huge improvement from my pathetic 4:43 performance last week. I guess I have acclimatized to this altitude more. I also ran in a different park this time - Parque La Carolina, which is supposedly like New York´s Central Park. I´d say that the only real similarity is that they are both settled in the city between skyscrapers.

I´m sooo excited to have a race to train for! And my first international race! Ahhh!

The Hardest 5-Minute Run of My Life

I really wish I could say that I did something impressive, like ran a 5-minute mile, but no. The hardest five minutes of running I ever endured were yesterday, when I attempted to run in my new city, Quito, Ecuador. Quito is the second highest capital in the world after La Paz, Bolivia. It is located about 2,850 meters -- 9,350 feet -- above sea level.

Many people suffer from altitude sickness upon arriving in Quito, but I was spared that malady. Instead, I was very tired all week and hungrier than usual. And I was out of breath much faster than usual. After 6 days in the city, I tried to go for a run. I was going to take the bus to a big park and go for a run, but I was kind of short on time, so I ran in the small park by my house.

People stared at me like I had 3 heads as I walked to the park. I was wearing running shorts and a tshirt...nothing scandalous. I guess people dont wear athletic attire here...

Thank goodness I didnt waste my time on the bus! I could only run for two minutes at a time, and didnt make it past 4 minutes 43 seconds. My lungs were SCORCHING. My mouth hurt! It was excruciatingly painful to breathe. Quito is wicked polluted, not like Santiago, Chile where the pollution hangs in a cloud over the city. Were talking huge black clouds of smoke erupting from every bus or truck that passes.

My lungs hurt the rest of the afternoon. Well see how further attempts at running go.

ECUADOR!

I may have failed to mention this, but I just moved to Ecuador on Tuesday. I plan on staying here for 3 to 4 months, and I am volunteering in a clinic in Quito.

I have yet to go running here, but hopefully I will figure that out this weekend. I have a travel blog that I´ve been writing in since September 2007, and the address is: http://marisabroad.blogspot.com

Spring or Fall Marathon?

This week I went for two runs in my new sneaks. I ran in the Lehigh Parkway (where my high school cross team practiced), and ran two different circuits. Both days I ran it was bout 85 degrees and sunny...HOT. One run was 3.8 miles and the other was 4.3...both runs that I have done literally hundreds of times in my life, and yet I struggled to complete them without taking breaks for water or to catch my breath.

In HS cross-country, we had to run "tours" of the Parkway, which is a 6.2 mile loop of the park. One of my teammates donated to my Boston Marathon fundraising, and added a note "it's only 4.34 tours!"....which made me feel really pathetic that I couldn't even finish one!


I attribute part of this to the fact that I haven't been running a lot, and partially to the fact that I haven't run in hot weather for 2 years (due to traveling I had no spring/summer since 07), and once the weather got nice in Boston I was recovering from the Marathon and not running. I was laughing while I was running in my sports bra thinking about how "Sports Bra Days" used to be such a big deal in high school, and they were reserved pretty much for >95 degree days. And then I ran past a girl from my high school team...she was wearing a shirt. Whooops.

While I was running this week, I was thinking about how I swore I would never again train for a Spring marathon. It meant running 10 miles through ankle deep snow and practically ice skating half-marathons, which were fun in hindsight, but in not so pleasant in the moment. Then I was thinking about one of my friends who is training for Chicago, and is doing long runs in this summer heat. Also not so pleasant. I guess that no one ever said training for a marathon would be pleasant though!

IT Band update: I pushed my little brother in the pool after he told me he would jump in with me and didn't. He was mad at me then, and jumped on me, crashing his heel right into my injured IT Band. OWwieeee.

NEW SHOES!

I have a love/hate relationship with new running shoes.

LOVE: Usually by the time I get new running shoes I have run the maximum 3-400 miles in my old kicks, and am starting to get aches and pains associated with old shoes. I like the cheap thrill of sharpie-ing the date onto the heels of the shoes so that I can remember when I got them.

HATE: I feel like such a dork with brand spankin' new clean running shoes.

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I understand why running shoes are so expensive, but it also pains me to shell out >$100 3 times a year for a new pair. Soo, I was totally psyched when I called my running store and asked if they had last year's model of my shoes, the Brooks Defyance, and they did! The Brooks Defyance 2 retails somewhere around $99, and they had 3 pairs of the Brooks Defyance 1 left marked down to only $59, and one was in my size! Such a score! Love 'em.

Trail Runs!

Apart from a one-time affair with a trail run in Sedona, AZ (110 degree heat with the sun beating down at 10 AM...), I have never really gone on a trail run. I suppose there aren't many opportunities to do that in Boston...

This past week I was up in Vermont on vacation with my family. We have a place at Smuggler's Notch where we have been going for the past 10 years. I've been up every year to ski in the winter, but I hadn't been up in the summertime since before I went to college!

In addition to the various hikes I did this week, I went on two trail runs. One I did at the end of a hike, and one I did just as a run.

1. I played disc golf with my dad and cousins in the morning, and realized that the cross-country ski trails that the disc golf course follows would be great to run on. I set out with no real course in mind, blasted Lady Gaga, and set out on the trails. I loved that I had no way of monitoring how far I was going, and that I had to focus more on where I was putting each foot, rather than how I felt. There were a lot of long uphills, though, which made me think that cross-country skiing must be really hard. Whatever - the long uphills meant long downhills on the way back. I raced a golfcart up the hill back to our condo...I won :D

2. After a hike, my brother and I did a mini-trail run back to our car to go pick the rest of my family up. This was way more trail-like with ups and downs and roots and rivers. It was cool. I don't think I could ONLY trail run, but I hope to move somewhere that I can mix it in with my normal city runs!

IT Band...STILL.

When the orthopedic doctor at school warned me that the cortisone shot I got before the Boston Marathon could have a negative impact on me, I wasn't too worried. At that point, I was beyond nervous that I wasn't going to be able to run/complete the Marathon, which I had been training so hard for that anything was worth it!

Now is a different story. It was definitely worth it to get the cortisone shot before the Marathon. I don't think I could have run it (or had such a great time running it!) without it. Unfortunately now I am back to an endemic level of enormous amount of IT band pain. I need to get new running shoes, and I have been running on country roads (which are super crowned) every day...bad combination for the IT band.

I was in NYC this weekend, and had a hard time walking around. Unlike being at school, I don't have a gym membership here in Pennsylvania, and it is not worth getting one because I am only here for about 10 more days, so I have nowhere to cross-train. Boo-hoo. Back to ibuprofen and icing!