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Running
When the flu hit me in Charleston I felt like death on two legs. I still toured around the city and enjoyed my stay on the houseboat despite the fever chills, but getting back to running has been more painful. Stiffness, muscle soreness, fatigue, and a persistent cough all have plagued me for days, so I've been focusing on a few tips to help with recovery and getting back to running fitness.
Snow in North Carolina can really put a crimp in training runs. Most of the powdery snow has already melted or been trampled into a thick sheet of ice so running is treacherous - so much so that as I write this I just watched a neighbor's kid face-plant on the street (it's fine; the kid is okay - they got up and just kept running. Good kid).
What's in a word? Or rather, what's in a silence? Long, hard work at a day job, and long, physical work in Johnston County forced my silence for the past week. I've never been one to plan blog posts more than a couple days in advance, so with a sudden onslaught of extra responsibilities and the sudden lack of time (an hour commute each way and extra work killed all my blogging and running time) meant radio silence. On Saturday though, stuck in Johnston County, I took the chance to explore somewhere new for a little stroll.
I posted yesterday about The Displaced Period Project and 5K and 1 mile "Ugly Sweater Fun Run" to raise money for menstrual supplies for area shelters. (No seriously, check out their GoFundMe page here! https://www.gofundme.com/displaced-periods) The write-up yesterday included just a fraction of the photos from the event - check out the full photo gallery!
We're not supposed to talk about it. We're not supposed to normalize it, or have any evidence of it, or even try to do anything about it to make it better. Let's break all those rules. "It" comes once a month. It's totally normal. It's all-natural. It's your period. Aunt Flo. "That time of month." Shark week. We have all these euphemisms so we don't have to talk about it, but maybe we should. The Displaced Period Project works to reduce the stigma, raise awareness, and raise funds for purchasing products for local shelters with a GoFundMe page and an Ugly Sweater Fun Run.
The temperature has been dropping to sub-freezing conditions as the polar vortex looms, ready to shift south a bit to make things really uncomfortable for us runners. It always takes a huge effort for me to run when it gets cold. And I'm not talking 45℉ chilly, but legitimately cold for Durham, North Carolina. Here are 5 tips on how to run in the cold!
I realized recently that as much as I talk about the American Tobacco Trail and as often as I go running on the trail that I've never actually written a blog post on it. Clearly I had to fix this. The American Tobacco Trail is the product of a rails-to-trails project converting 22+ miles of railroad track into a mixed use trail. The ATT now runs from Durham to Apex and includes miles of paved, mixed, and compact gravel surfaces. Since the trail is so long and has diverse surfaces and amenities at intermittent trailheads I am breaking this up into a series of posts focusing on a few miles at a time and highlighting special features, parking, and amenities, starting with the New Hill-Olive Chapel trailhead.
I don't know why but whenever I sit down to read a fiction book I feel like it has to be a book of substance and that means missing out on a bunch of books that I thought might be interesting but wouldn't make it to the top of my reading list. So in between podcast episodes and zombie stories I figured that I'd try out audiobooks on long runs, road trips, and while multi-tasking.
