Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Cold and Nipply

The other day I was out on  my first out and back long run in quite a while.  It was cold, raining, and the wind was blowing against me the whole way out to my turnaround point.  I was adequately dressed with my wind breaker, long sleeve shirt, undershirt, sweat pants, stocking cap, and even my Garmin.  All the necessary equipment for running was on me or so I thought…

After the turn around point I began to feel discomfort in the chest region of my body.  As I continued running the pain and discomfort grew.  Towards the end of the run my nipples felt as though they had been dragged across the carpet of my elementary school music room floor and then passed over a hand held cheese grater.  My elementary school was too far away for that to have happened recently and the cheese grater was back at the house so I figured the t-shirt, soaked through by the rain, had something to do with it.  At some point during the four mile trek back to the house I realized that all that talk about Band-Aids and Vaseline on long runs was not some ruse, but sage like advice to protect that sensitive area of the body.

When I got home I told the Spouse that I was pretty sensitive.  I promptly pulled up my shirt to show her and gain her sympathy and perhaps empathy.  She had nursed our kids for a while; and I felt that for a person of similar experiences and traumas, empathizing, would be a simple task.  However, my Spouse did not seem to understand the extreme pain I was in and even laughed a little when I suggested I knew how she felt when nursing. 

It has now been two full days since the injury, the run was Saturday morning, and the scabs are well formed.  As the healing process continues I have two points of caution for anyone out there who has yet to got through something of this nature.  First, wind breakers are not ‘rain’ breakers.  Sure the jacket deceptively repels water for the first few minutes of your run, but after that you might as well ditch the jacket and try and dodge the rain drops.  Second, whether nursing or running long distances Band-Aids are a necessary piece of equipment for anyone interested in either of these forms of entertainment.

For more information go to About.com.

1 comment:

  1. hahaha - I don't think a bandaid would help much when nursing...the pain is ongoing, and you would have to replace them way too often to make it worth it

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