The pilgrimage

Saturday was beautiful--sunny, kind of chilly, the kind of weather that makes you want to get out there and run. Not all my teammates agreed: it was on the wrong side of freezing when we started our run. I was feeling a little dehydrated, but I wasn't too worried about the 14 miles that lay ahead of me. It wasn't until the hills that I started to question whether I really had it in me. You know those days when you're not quite sure if you ever fully woke up in the morning? It was like that. Most runs have a beginning (where you're not quite warmed up yet), a middle (where you hit your stride), and an end (where you start to wish you were almost done). This run just didn't have a middle. I was able to run up more of Heartbreak than I was two weeks ago, but I still walked the end of it.
Heartbreak on Saturday was a strange sight--the sheer number of runners heading up wouldn't have surprised me had there been some shrine at the top. It really did resemble a pilgrimage, though trust me, there ain't no absolution at Boston College, or at least none for runners.
We turned around just before the turn down to Cleveland Circle, and started to head down--after a few miles down, I felt something in my left calf, something that I didn't want to be feeling. It's always hard to describe pain--it wasn't terrible, but I felt it every time I put my foot down. I stopped to stretch it out a couple of times, but it kept coming back. I tried to massage it away with The Stick, but it was too painful to apply any real pressure. I ran until the last hill back up to Wellesley, when Sarad came back down to get me. (Amazingly enough, I still wasn't last!) Sarad said that my leg pain probably had a lot to do with my dehydration and my tight muscles--I believed him at the time, but it does still hurt, so I'm starting to get nervous.
I took my first ice bath of the season when I got home--I locked myself in the bathroom with a sweatshirt, a burrito, and a 10-pound bag of ice, and forced myself to sit in the bathtub for 10 minutes, until my burrito was done and my feet had turned a disturbing shade of purple. My legs did feel much better after, though.
I felt well enough on Sunday to head out for a 4-mile recovery run--the 40-something degree temperatures helped significantly.
I'm taking the day off today, and I'm only going to run 5 miles tomorrow, so we'll have to see how the calf does. I'm taking plenty of "Vitamin I" (what my dad calls Advil), and doing lots of stretching and icing, but the muscle is still too sensitive for a real massage. I'm going to try to book a massage appointment for Thursday night, so hopefully by then it can take the pressure. In the meantime, send it lots of good thoughts!