Mother Nature herself has embarrassingly defeated me. She has employed all of her high powers to conquer me, and I have submissively and without dignity conceded to her higher will.
2 days ago, the temperature was about 14 degrees Celsius. For all you old school chumps or Americans, that’s approximately 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Considerably warm by my standards, especially for the end of March. Mother Nature knew that I had an 8 kilometer running race this morning (PowerBar Spring Run-Off 8K), so she lowered her temperature down to 0 degrees Celsius (32 Fahrenheit) and she dumped millions of large fluffy wet snowflakes down on me. Waking up without much time to get to my race this morning, I threw some clothes on quickly without too much consideration and took the subway to my race. The plan was to take off my jogging pants and sweater near the beginning of the race and run the race with shorts and a t-shirt. Not bloody likely considering the weather, so I decided to run the race with my sweater and my jogging pants, both of which are far from being water resistant.
As a result, I ran the race weighing about 10 pounds more than my body weight. Then Mother Nature decided to blow a very hard wind at me, along with the snowflakes protruding my eyes. Half the race I could barely see 2 meters in front of me, but I kept going. Just as I was thinking that Mother Nature had already had her final laugh, she throws one more sucker punch at me. The course consisted of some very steep inclines and declines, which I was managing okay for the first 7.8 kilometers or so. The last 200-meter stretch was a very long steep hill, all the way to the finish line. So much for the finish-line sprint that I had thoroughly looked forward to. I got to the finish line and felt like dying, it was the most difficult run I’d ever endured, and Mother Nature didn’t help one single bit.
In hindsight, my time wasn’t too bad; it was 34 minutes and 10 seconds (107th overall out of 1246). (Full results) I had someone tell me after the race that his time was the same as his regular 10K time, so that made me feel better too. Here are some pictures of me in my defeated state.
Today’s running attire
View of the snowstorm from my balcony