A long silence.

It's been a busy couple of weeks.  Cuevas was fantastically busy over the holiday weeks and we as a family really needed to spend time up there.

Then, I wanted to make some measurable progress on the visitcuevas.com website, so I spent some time up there alone and without the interruption of a 2.5 year old gymnast leaping on my back every time I sit down.  I was able to get some stuff done.  It still needs some design work and content needs to be created for a couple of pages so I may spend another day or two up there this coming week to try to finish up, perhaps going up Thursday.

There have been a couple of quite notable things in the last couple of weeks.  I've been logging my two longest runs for the week on back to back days.  This is pretty standard operating procedure for folks training for ultra distance events, but it's new to me.  As far as the running muscles go, I haven't had any huge complaints, but I'm also not logging huge miles.  As far as the rest of the body goes, well...

Last week my long runs were 7 (Wednesday) and 10 (Thursday) miles.  I did them in the middle of the day in La Guardia on hot sunny days.  Hot means 97 degrees and by sunny I mean:

I snapped that photo at mile 5 of the 7 mile run on Wednesday.  At the end of that run, I weighed 85.7 Kilos (a loss of 1.8 kilos).  The next day I went out for 10 miles in similar conditions.  Again I dropped about 2 kilos during my run.

I got a headache.

The headache was so bad, in fact, I couldn't sleep.  It stuck with me throughout the day Friday.  I drank lots of water and even added salt to my bottle, but the pain behind my eyes wouldn't go away.  Acetaminophen helped, sending the headache to a more distant place, but it didn't eliminate the problem by any stretch of the imagination.  I spent a lot of time lying on my bed and in general being grumpy.

Sorry Deneb.

Sorry Nataly.

Needless to say, Friday turned into a day off.  I needed it, because when I awoke on Saturday I still had the headache.  It had eased off, but I was no where near a happy camper.  With the help of the Tylenol, I did get out for my run that day, but it was slow and rather uninspired.

I finally got back to normal on Monday, up in Cuevas.  It was cooler and I think I finally got back on top of my hydration and electrolytes.  Somehow through all of this, I've stayed on top of my workouts.  I have yet to miss a scheduled run, and this week I'll be able to offer Nataly the choice of my running days off.  Which is better for her, us and Deneb: Saturday or Sunday?

That's nice.

Anyway, since last I wrote, I've logged something like 99 miles and climbed something like 9000 feet.  Not a bad 3 weeks.  The vast majority of those climbing feet have come on the road to Bella Vista.  This coming week, I think I'll do my long run on the road to Palermo.  I've only hit that once and I was really turned off by the mud, but obviously it's not muddy all of the time.  Not sure why I've never been back...

Thanks for reading and keep your electrolytes up.
jay