Saturday turned out to be a great day to run in Huntsville. We took off at 700 am and the heat was somewhat bearable during the early morning hours. But, alas, the heat steadily went up as we progressed in the race. As you can see by the picture above, by the time I finished I was completely drenched, but it felt great to run. If anybody in the Huntsville ever wants to challenge themselves with a nice trail run, this is a good one. It had everything. Along the 15.5 mile route, it had 5 water stations fully stocked with ice cold water, HEED, and assorted soda drinks. It had 3 fully stocked aid stations with ice cold water, HEED, peanut butter, salt tablets, bananas, candy, cereal, tuna fish, crackers, and various soda drinks. When you crossed the finish line, there was another two fully stocked stations as well as two massage tables with registered massage therapists waiting to give you a rub down.
I had a good run, and if I recall correctly, I crossed the finish line at 2:50:08, just 5:08 shy of my original time goal. I ran into some hard times during the race, I won't lie, loooooooots of uphill stretches. Everything that I knew would start hurting along the run route started hurting as planned, which is understandable. No new "hurts" so all is well. For those that do not know, running is no longer "easy" for me. I myself am 50% disabled and have labral tears in both shoulders and free floating cartilage in both hips and a crooked foot bone from a broken foot on a freak jump at Airborne school. At the end of the day, the shoulders felt fine, but the hips hurt quite a bit and my foot was definitely the worst. At the 15 mile mark, I started cramping in both calves, but it could have been much, much worse. Had I cramped at mile 12, it would have made for a loooooong last 3.5 miles.
So, today, the day after the race, I am sore, but not aching as bad as I thought. All is well! I'm taking next week off, and then hitting the training hard again the following week.
As promised, I am looking for my next race/bike ride already. When I find said event, I will relink my donation page to the blog and will again ask folks to donate to my cause. Again, I want to thank all listed below that donated for the 25K, we did very well raising funds! Altogether, we've raised $2,935 !!! Well done, gang !!!
A.D. Szilagyi
Aaron Cox
Amanda Caprari
Betty Myrthil
Blair Nahm
Brian McCoy
Brian Rollins
Brian and Kim Zickefoose
Cathy Johnston
David James
Diane Daniels
Dominic Rondinelli
Dominick Forte
Eileen and Gary Lundgren
Gary Cruse
Greg Zickefoose
Gregory Horvath
Carter and Jessica Smyth
Jimmy Beasley
John Galante
Jon Ellis
J.W. Smith
Kevin Corrinet
Kountze High School
Kountze Middle School
Leonard Kacuba
Luke Nichols
Matthew Eckhoff
Natalie Christofferson
Natalie Ward
Regina Galante
Regina Hines, Maureen Clayton and the Cornwall Central School District Key Club
Saana Gill
Susan Sobrepena
Suzanne Frazier
Thomas Schrader
Thomas Toner
