With apologies to "A Tale of Two Cities"
It was the best of times...
This has been an amazing week. It was my first week with students at my new school. The environment is so amazing; I just love it! I had 4 excellent workouts; I nailed each of them exactly the way I wanted to.

It was the worst of times...
Then today happened. At the start of my planned 10-miler, it was already in the 80s and 80% humidity. It was not good conditions, but I felt great and away we went. The first 6 miles felt really good, though they were too fast given the conditions. Add in a really challenging route (take a look at the elevation profile) and I was doomed to slow down quite a bit in the last 4 miles.

What I did not know is that things were set to get a lot worse. About 8.5 miles in, I suddenly had blurry vision in my left eye and I got dizzy. Unfortunately, I was kind of in no-man's land. The faster runners had gone ahead when I slowed down at the 6-mile mark; the slower runners were well behind. I immediately stopped running, but I could not simply wait where I was so I walked. Eventually others caught me (about a half-mile from the finish) and went ahead to get ice and help.

I am sure I overheated; I probably even had some level of heatstroke. One of my friends that was there is an emergency first-responder with the CDC and is trained for virtually every situation. She evaluated me and yelled at me for ignoring the signs of heat-related issues...but I never had the typical signs!

I feel much better now, but I will definitely take it very easy the rest of the weekend. And I am making a hard decision to bail on the Savannah Marathon and do the Half-Marathon instead. There are really only 2 reasons I was training for the full: because it would be my 5th marathon; and because I really want to run with the amazing Bonnie G. I can run my 5th at another event some day and Bonnie is way too cool to be upset with me switching to the half. (She's going to ROCK and ROLL anyway!)

So, I'm going to take the easy route and do the Disneyland Half-Marathon in a couple weeks and then the RnR Savannah Half-Marathon in November. Maybe I can train to really gun it in Savannah and crush my half-marathon PR...