17 - My Skull Is Splitting in Half

Running Song of the Day:

This song popped up on my 700+ song playlist of running songs on shuffle mode. Literally turned on when I had about 4 minutes left to get back home and was just starting the final hill climb.

This ain’t a good song, but it’s a good song if you’re a millennial of a certain age that listened to this in high school when it was a CERTIFIED BANGER.

Today’s Run:

Woke up at 3:30 in the morning from a bad headache. In and out of sleep for the next three hours. Tried to get outta bed and start the day with some reading. Hard to focus.

Feels like there’s another layer between my skull and the skin on my head, and inside of that layer, there’s a bunch of pain juice that sloshes around a little bit if I’m looking down and then look up or if I’m laying down and then sit up, stuff like that. Also it drips down to cover the left side of my face, gets behind my eye, etc.

Pain juice sloshing around, what an annoyance.

Headache/pain juice all day. Was ready to throw in the towel on this “run every single day in Spring” experiment/dumb thing. Just really hard to live like that. I don’t get headaches really often at all, maybe one a year on a busy year. But when I get ‘em, they crush me down into a little tiny ball.

Took a tylenol around 1:30 pm. It kicked in around 2:15. Did a bunch of baby stuff (walked around like a baby, pooped my pants like a baby, etc) and then almost immediately knew that since I no longer felt this pain I was undoubtedly going to go out running.

4:00pm, feels like 40°, god put the mist setting on his hose and let it spray down all over me. Soaked through entirely 30 minutes into the run. I wore my rain thing from Cotopaxi.

Let’s talk about my rain thing from Cotopaxi.

It’s a super lightweight rain thing. It’s got absolutely no breathability, no real insulation, and it soaks pretty easily. It’s really only good for very very light rain in otherwise enjoyable weather. It’d be pretty good as a wind jacket, I think, but I don’t wear things like wind jackets, because like, I just deal with the wind? I think wind jackets were invented by the marketers at Patagonia et al to sell more shit to you.

Like, I’ve never checked the weather and been like “oh man, extra windy today, better get my wind jacket,” or anything like that. It’s never been a desire. You just wear a normal jacket, right? Like, a normal jacket is a wind jacket.

Anyway—my shitty lightweight rain jacket thing by Cotopaxi. I wore it today. It was fully soaked halfway through the run. I’m not sure if at that point it was better to be wearing it, or if just going in a t-shirt would’ve been better.

I never really know the best time to use this shitty fuck lightweight rain wind jacket thing by Cotopaxi. I’ve worn it hiking in South Africa, running ultramarathons in New Jersey, and any conceivable day in between where I thought I might need a ghostly thin layer of obnoxious colors with me. I really like that it stuffs down into a pocket really easily. That’s about the only real positive. I think that singular positive is the reason it gets so much airtime. It’s there. It’s thrown into my back pocket, or a free space in my backpack. Easy, small, shitty. Just like me.

Anyway anyway—I was wearing the thing, and running, so I kept wearing it and kept running.

Rain really picked up near the end. I got back to my little park and it was completely empty of people. This place on a weekend, even in the Winter, is packed with asshole dog walkers who can’t control their dogs, little kids riding bikes, people fishing, and everything in between. Today? Ghost town.

Got home, fully soaked, but felt good that I got another 10k in. Knee felt fine (might’ve been the tylenol) and life felt good.

I thought about something else to write for the end of today’s post when I got home, but it’s gone now.

6.31 miles
in
1:09:21
so it was
5.5mph on avg
with
551 ft of vert
and i’ve run
116.88 miles this Spring