Falling in the river, Fivefingers, and more.

So I fell out of the blogosphere for a while, but I certainly kept myself busy. Since I last wrote, I've run three more races, two of which I placed in my age group. I also went hog wild in a local running store and got lots of great new gear - including a pair of Vibram FiveFingers. Yes, I finally caved in and bought them! And they're awesome!

Let's see, then I agreed to run 11 miles with a running buddy - the farthest I've run since the half-marathon last year - and followed that with a 15-mile hike the next day. I was so proud of myself for being able to run it, but the hiking the next day was too much, and made my IT band and knee a little problematic.

One of the races I mentioned was a 4-mile trail run, which was held by my town's environmental commission in conjunction with an Earth Day festival. In addition to the race, they held guided canoe tours on the river, and loving kayaking but never having been in a canoe, I thought that I'd try it out. I was put in a boat along with a gentleman about my father's age who asked that I steer because he had a weak wrist. I didn't mind, but that meant that he sat in the front and I sat in the back, which was not an even distribution of weight. When we got out on the river, the current was pretty strong, and I didn't have to do much paddling, but there was a lot of work going into steering due to a lot of downed trees in the river. It was really beautiful, and I wished that we could have gone a little slower to enjoy the scenery even more. I got very nervous every time we came near rocks in the water or had to maneuver around trees, especially because my boat-mate and I didn't have much of a communication system worked out for steering and paddling, but we didn't have any collisions. We were just about to the end of our trip when the river branched out into two directions, and I lost sight of the guide ahead of us. There was a lot of debris in the water here, and I didn't know quite where to go. The current carried us along, and I realized a little too late that it was going to take us right into a tree. I started to paddle ferociously to get us to turn and probably would have succeeded if, all at once, the water didn't disappear from under my paddle as we hit a sand bar. It happened so quickly that there was nothing I could do. We ran aground, tipped over, and fell right into the river all in one fell swoop!

Hey, if I didn't tip us, there wouldn't be a fun story to tell, would there?

So those are some highlights from the past few months. I'll have to get back into blogging, because once my IT band/knee start feeling better, I want to train for another half. A full marathon still seems like it might kill me (or at least cause lasting injury), but a half is definitely very doable.