December 3, 2007

4" of rain and an indoor half marathon

The Seattle area has been hit with near record rainfall over the last 24 - 36 hours. Only one other day had more rainfall in Seattle. This is after the 4" of snow on Saturday. There is local flooding and several roads and even highways are closed. The peninsula was hit even harder with rainfall in the double digits. The winds have been high as well, topping out at 129mph on the coast.

Seattle has a reputation as a rainy city, but we don't get the torrential downpours very often. It more like seemingly endless drizzle. This "100 year" rainfall and wind meant that running outside didn't sound too appealing. Unfortunately I was scheduled to run 13 miles this weekend.

Off to the gym. The treadmills shut off after 60 minutes, so this meant a couple of restarts and some serious machine hogging. Fortunately the gym was pretty quiet until the very end. The power flickered about 2 miles into my run, so the treadmill came to a stop. Luckily it wasn't so jarring that I went flying forward and ended up on YouTube.

The last few runs I have done outside it has been in the 30s, so running for over 2 hours inside turned me into a sweaty mess. I suppose it will be good training for my next marathon in warmer temperatures. On the way home I was diverted a few times by flooded roads, and I saw a fountain of water shooting 3 feet out of a storm drain. Fortunately our house is on higher ground and we just get a street's worth of water pooling in our driveway.

I haven't gone outside to check the fence posts yet...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! I hadn't heard! Better call the folks... hope you guys are surviving it ok. Warm, dry thoughts!

Anonymous said...

You rock! You are the only person I know that would suffer 13 miles indoors. How boring that sounds to me and I probably just would have skipped until better weather.
Hey, indoor tri anyone?