A.M. Ran with Jeff this morning. It was supposed to be an uneventful run, but it was not so. The pace was very uneventful due to the darkness and the early hour of the day. The slow pace reduced the clearance between my feet and the ground which is naturally low to begin with, the conversation distracted me from paying attention to the footing, and the darkness compounded the danger. So I clipped a bump in the road and went down. Got up right away thinking no big deal, a couple of scrapes, and started running. However, a few steps down the road I noticed I started to feel dizzy and uncomfortable, like I could not get enough air, even though I was not hyperventilating. I told Jeff I needed to stop for a minute. He figured out right away what happened and asked me if I had hit the ground with my chest, which I did. He said this had happened to him before once when he was playing freeze tag. At the same time I remembered an incident a few years ago when a hockey player was hit in a chest with a puck and died on the spot due the heart stopping. This gave me a concern, but with Jeff's survival story, and the fact that I was still conscious and able to move and reason, I felt a measure of comfort and confidence that this would turn out to be no big deal. Things got a bit worse for a minute - I felt I needed to lay down, and I felt my heart doing one hard thump, and then an awkward pause. So obeyed my instinct and laid down. Then after about 20 seconds I felt an urge to walk, and I obeyed that instinct as well. After about 10 seconds of walking I felt ready to run. For about a quarter mile I still felt a bit nauseous but after that normal for the rest of the run. We spent a good portion of the remainder of the run discussing how fast Jeff could have gotten the ambulance to get to that section of the trail. Decided 20 minutes would have been very good. Had this been more serious by that time I would have been having a good time with my relatives in the spirit world. Dropped Jeff off at 7.25, and went for 3 more. Did a tempo pickup for a mile in 5:37. Could not get going until the last quarter - had the fear of hitting another bump on the trail and that made me too cautious to break 5:40 pace for a while. Finally I overcame that fear and hit a 1:20 quarter. Five Fingers - 1362.32 miles P.M. 1.08 with Julia in 10:29, 1.5 with Benjamin and Jenny in 15:04. We took it easy because Benjamin got hurt playing soccer and his shin was hurting.
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