Great Falls and great failures

Ever have one of those days where it feels like everything you try to do ends in failure? As if the universe just didn't like you and wanted to see just how far it could push you until you broke down into a sobbing pile of mush?

Today began with what was supposed to be an easy 10-miler with Mandy. The last run of our 60-mile week. All was going well until about mile 6 when a sharp, stabbing pain shot up my left foot every time I tried to run up a hill. It didn't feel as bad going downhill - probably because I could put more weight on the back of my foot. Of course, the route we decided to run today was hilly so I ended up walking most of the last 4 miles back to the car. Discouraging and definitely cause for concern since our 50K is in 3 weeks. I'm hoping it's just a tired tendon or something minor and not a stress fracture or anything that would prevent me from running Capon. After all the time I've put into training, I would be really, really, really be upset if I couldn't run.

Later in the day I attempted to download data from my Garmin to Garmin's website. My miserable run from this morning downloaded fine and reflected my tortoise-like pace. But wouldn't you know it, my 28-frickin-mile run from yesterday refused to download. It's clearly on the watch because I can scroll through the data and see exactly how long it took me to run every mile. After almost two hours of research, it turns out that yesterday's file seems to be corrupt and the only way to download the data would be to have Garmin support fix the file for you. I sent Garmin support an email but I have little confidence that they'll get back to me in this millenium.

Speaking of yesterday's run, we ran from Great Falls Park to Algonkian Park and back. It's about a 24 mile loop so we had to tack on an extra 4 miles once we got back to Great Falls. Compared to last week's massacre at Sky Meadows, yesterday's run was relatively flat and at a better pace. A few pictures below including one of our very first stream crossing. (Capon supposedly has 40+ stream crossings.)

Since I'm trying to keep off my feet, I decided to upload some pics of our running group to Facebook. At least, that's what I attempted to do. FB decided it didn't want to cooperate and errored several times while I attempted to upload the files. When it finally seemed to cooperate, it looks like some of the files still didn't survive the journey. Bleh.

Steve isn't home and since I needed someone to whine to, I decided to blog. (Yes, you ARE the lucky recipient of my whining.) Even this blogging attempt has failed once already. I'm typing as quickly as I can so that I can post this before the evil forces of nature notices what I'm doing and puts an end to it all.