A Dizzy Beginning

What do you do when you wake up and see that the left side of your face is swollen, haven’t run for a whole week, then after getting out of your car you feel lightheaded probably from the aftereffects of the anesthetic given to you during oral surgery 36 hours prior? Do you run? Walk? A combination of both? Or just give up, go back home, and do nothing since you have an excuse to do so?

In my case I wanted to at least try to do the run/walk combination and be conservative with the pace and distance. Seeing Linda and Colleen certainly made that decision easier. The harder decision was how far to run or what to do when the dizziness struck again specially on a hot and humid day. The plan was to run for four minutes and walk one minute, with Linda doing 20 miles, Colleen, I wasn’t sure how much, and I was going to try the shorter 10 miles since I haven’t run for seven days while trying to recover from my ankle ailments. When we hit 2 miles I told the ladies that I might bail out and turn around on our next walk break because I was getting concerned about the dizziness. I certainly didn’t want to faint on the course and someone had to call the paramedics. Well we passed that walk break, and another, and another, until the ladies asked me why I hadn’t turned around yet. Ok, I’ll turn around at 4 miles and track back on the course so I can see the other AREC runners who started thirty minutes after us (we started early and the rest started on time). I bid Linda and Colleen goodbye at 4 miles, wished them luck on their longer run, and told them I was going to make it up to them next time when I was feeling better.

So I started tracing the course in reverse so it would give me 8 miles when I got back to the finish. I encountered the other runners and waved to them, while Todd on his bike gave me the “what’s wrong” look. So I just said “oral surgery two days ago” and that was good enough. I saw Monica who was my erstwhile pacing partner for a few weeks before I started hurting too much and she told me that I was a diehard. Then Kim and Rick came up and I gave them the same “oral surgery” excuse and they told me to be careful. Thanks for your concern everybody.

After about a mile I came into a ‘fork in the road’ situation. Do I keep running straight ahead and make it back to the finish? Or do I make a right turn on Bayshore to make it a slightly longer run? Since the dizziness seemed to have subsided, I opted for the right turn and pretty soon, I was running in the same direction as the Team in Training group and the Sole Runners group. That helped a lot and by the time I reached the finish area I was already slightly over 9 miles. The only problem was, there was nobody else at the finish and not wanting to wait around for the others to come in, I kept on running. I wanted to find Rick and Kim who were doing 10 miles. I thought they would be coming in pretty soon, but it took another 2 miles before I finally saw them. So I ran back to the finish with them and by the time we got there, I had covered a total of 13 miles. Not bad for a limpy, gimpy, slow, and dizzy runner who started out somewhat wimpy. In the end, I was all in a tizzy for what I was able to accomplish.

So what caused the lightheadedness in the early part of the run? Residual effects of anesthesia? Maybe. Loss of blood during surgery? Perhaps. But there is one thing I didn’t expect to find out during this run. Discovering a new training program: run just one day a week and still finish a half marathon (but only if you don’t care about finishing time). Wow, what a concept!