Run!

Carla went to have lunch with her folks today so I was pretty much left to my own devices. I spent most of the day working out if I was going to go to Lisbon for a night and if I was going to go to the Electricity museum. If so, how I was going to get around and when I was going to have to leave for the airport. I think I made hard work of it because it took much longer than it should have. When I looked at my watch it was 4pm and I hadn't even left the house. I decided that to make up for this wasted day I needed to go for a big ass run.

I had noticed where I had been running on the boardwalk the previous couple of days there was km marker signs for a 15km run end to end. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to go to the end of it which was around 12.5km toward Porto from my starting point (the end of the road at the beach from Carlas place was 2.5km along the track). I got to the wee chapel thing I had seen a couple of nights before and decided to have a look inside. I found Jesus there (unsurprisingly):

I carried on my merry way. About 5km into my run I realised that this was possibly a terrible idea, considering I had done bugger all running in the last two months. But I was committed (I don't know why I thought that). About 7km into the run I decided that knowing which way the direction of the wind was would be handy. If I had a tail wind going out that probably didn't bode well for the run back. I turned around and took a couple of steps towards home and realised I had a pretty stiff breeze against me. No wonder I felt so good! This worried me a little as going back into a headwind could make the trip home pretty harrowing, but I was committed (I still don't know why I thought that). I pushed on and it was only at about 9.5km I was starting to feel fatigued and get sore muscles I realised that if I turned around now I was going to save myself a 6km run (3km to the end and 3km back), but again, I was committed. At 11.5km I started to get a bit of a sore knee but I was basically there so I ran to the end. I took this photo to prove to Carla that I had run to Gaia.

Then it dawned on me that I was pretty buggered and now I had to run 12.5km get home. Meow. This time I really was committed, I hadn't taken a cell phone so I just listened to the voice of Jimmy in my head telling me to "man up" and so I set off for home. About 2km into the run home my stomach started rumbling and I got really tired all of a sudden. I probably should have eaten a little more than a couple of bowls of muesli today. I had brought 20 euro with me though so I stopped for some emergency sugars: a cup of coke and a chocolate ice cream. I wolfed them down as quick as possible and told my body to stop burning muscle and burn some of the sugar I had ingested. The run home wasn't too bad after that (I was slightly concerned that I might have a bit of a sore gut with a cup of coke and an ice cream rattling round in my belly but I guess they must have been instantaneously ingested), but it was quite long. Then the sun went down. Just before it did I got back to the chapel again and took another obligatory sunset picture:

By 20km my legs started to give out a bit. There were a few muscles getting grumpy and I couldn't run up the inclined boardwalks any more. but I only had another 5km to go so I kept going. It was getting really dark now and I couldn't be bothered running for much longer so I ran a bit faster to get home quicker.

All up I was out for about 3 hours, but I had a bit of a rest-walk at the 12.5km mark and stopped at the chapel to take photos (also a quick stop for emergency sugars) so I reckon it probably took me about 2.5 hours to run the 25km. Despite being pretty sore tonight I am pretty happy that I can still run a half marathon in a reasonable time with little to no training.

For dinner we went to a pizza place on the foreshore and I gutsed a whole pizza and a shitload of bread and olives.