*burp*

Jeez, what the heck?! I just finished what was a fairly typical meal for me: leftover stew in an acorn squash. Not a huge helping of stew, due to the smallish size of the squash, either. But for some reason, I now feel very Violet Beauregard, post-gum-incident. Oof! What on earth?! Can an individual squash have mutant amounts of fiber or something? The stew itself didn’t even have potatoes or the like – just peppers, tomatoes, onions, and a very tiny amount of goat meat (somebody must have taken most of the meat on the first night I served it, ahem). I’m thinking it was the squash, and now I feel as though I need to take a rolling pin to my midsection…or a stickpin. Pop!

It’s raining today, really raining and not just drizzling, for what feels like the first time in a while. That’s likely just my imagination, but it does seem like I haven’t had to run in rain in a long time. I did today, though! Well, I suppose I could have gone to the gym and played hamster for a bit, but…ugh. It’s not unpleasant to run in the rain, even if you choose the wrong pants and discover a few minutes in that this fabric loves water and will happily absorb just as much as you can throw at it. And then I gave up trying to hop puddles (running by the lake means, of course, that that’s where all the run-off is running off, so the path was flooded muchly) and just splashed right through them, which, when added to the pants miscalculation, meant that I was probably toting several pounds of water in my clothes and shoes by the end of the run. Whatever; at least I didn’t overheat!

And it’s time to lose any prissy sissy notions about not getting messy on runs, anyway. And I quote from the Devil’s Lake website:

Basically, a difficult, wicked on and off trail run with stupid spots. Stupid spots include swamp crossings, river crossings, hills too steep to climb and can only be a butt slide down. Did we mention poison ivy, thorns, poor marking, bad (no) footing, a waiver that mentions your death 3 times and that we charge you for this?

Yeaaaaaaaah. So who wants to come out and pace Rachel and me? (Actually, can you have pacers for this one? The site doesn’t mention. Often, they’ll say no pacers until the second half or something, and 50Ks don’t really need pacers, anyway, but it could be fun.) The course leg descriptions are also cracking me up:

There are some dangerous steep drop offs in the area … follow pink and be careful, we don’t want to have to go in there and try to find you or your splatter.

Now, beside that, what’s a little rain matter on a five-mile mid-week jaunt?