Altitude is Everything!

For Thanksgiving, we drove from our home in Olympia, Washington to Idaho Falls, Idaho.  And back again.  822 miles in a car.  Each way.  With three children.  And I survived!  Honestly, my girlies are great travelers.  There was only a minimum of whining, an expected amount of bickering and I only remember cursing three times.  Not too shabby.  Mother of the Year award, here I come!  Ha.  Though the time in the car eventually made me feel like this...

...it was well worth it!  We thoroughly enjoyed relaxing and catching up with our friends and family and eating waaaayyyy too much very delicious food.

We stayed at Tyler's parents' house and they graciously let me run on their treadmill.  Running outside in the wintertime in Idaho Falls is a cold and windy prospect and Olympia has already softened me.  Barely six months out of Alaska and my blood seems to already be thinning.  But I digress.

On Wednesday, I hopped on their treadmill, ready to pound out an easy four miles.  I thought I'd keep the pace around eleven minutes per mile.  I was going to be running a virtual 10K Turkey Trot the next morning (more on that later), so I didn't want to push myself too hard.  About half a mile into my run, I was DYING!  It felt so hard!  I only had the incline at 2.5 %, so I couldn't figure out why I was struggling so much.  Finally, a mile or so later, it occurred to me.  The elevation of Idaho Falls: 4700 ft.  Elevation of Olympia: 187 feet.  Well, duh.  And just like that, my time goal for the aforementioned 10K went up dramatically.  It also made me realize that I'm going to have to lower my expectations for a half marathon that I'll be running in March near Zion National Park.  Elevation of Zion National Park: 4000 ft.  Dangit.  But it's a good reminder that what really matters when it comes to my runs is not how fast I finish them, but that I do them at all.  That even though my "easy" four-mile-run was much harder than I had thought it would be, I didn't give up.  I powered through it.  I got stronger.  And yes, I could've slowed down, but my pride didn't let me that day.  Regardless of my speed, each of my runs is an accomplishment in and of itself.  And they each help minimize the damage inflicted by too many pieces of pumpkin pie.  And apple pie.  And, and, and, etc.  :)

This is not to say that I won't soon be googling, "How to prepare for high-altitude races when you're stuck training at sea level"...anyone out there have any good advice?