My friend A.L.’s house. Spring is here! Sort of!

My friend A.L.’s house. Spring is here! Sort of!

Seven days later, and we’ve happily landed again on Martini Fridays, where Adrienne Martini, recounts her training for the Pittsburgh Half-Marathon using the Train Like a Mother: Finish It Half-Marathon plan.

Despite the lovely country pic that leads this post, I’m going to warn you up front that this post contains TMI issues. So if you don’t want to read a quasi-graphic description of things that can happen to the female body, you might want to give this post a pass. Take a minute and give this a good think, especially if you are my father, who has been known to skip over to another mother runner on occasion, if only to see what I’ve gotten myself into this time.

Still here? OK, then. You have been warned.

From age 12 and on, my period and I have gotten along fine. I mean, it’s not my favorite biological function ever but it’s never been that big a deal. The relationship has only been helped by my clock-steady cycle. Even without the help of birth control pills, which I was on during my wacky 20s (which weren’t so wacky, really), I could time it almost down to the hour.

Then I had a second baby and settled in to my 40s. Now I’m in bizarro world.

I can only sort of predict when Aunt Flo will show up. She visits more or less monthly and pleasantly enough — but every three or four months, she’s a beast. It feels like my uterus is chewing its way out of my abdomen, with all of the gore and pain that you’d expect. I would be in awe if I weren’t so grossed out and horrified.

Before I started this half-marathon training, whenever these killer monthlies would strike, I’d just avoid longer runs for a day or two, because no combination of feminine hygiene products could hold back the tide and remain comfortable enough to go long in. Super-plus tampons failed and those super-sized pads chafe like a son-of-a-gun after a mile or two.

Remember: You were warned about the TMI.

Last week, the mega-menses paid a visit — and the worst of it hit on Wednesday, the day before I was supposed to take on a four-mile speed work session. I could have rallied had I not been hit with a second blow: a sick kid.

Clearly, this was taken after the ibuprofen kicked in.

Clearly, this was taken after the ibuprofen kicked in.

The Boy looked peaky when he came home from school on Wednesday. He didn’t look icky enough to make me immediately run for the thermometer but right after dinner, he fell sound asleep on my office floor while playing Minecraft. I knew he was officially sick.

My husband and I are lucky enough to have relatively flexible schedules and work environments.  He’d be able to come home while I taught my classes and I could squeeze in some grading while the Boy lounged on the coach. Squeezing in that speed work, however, was turning into a logistical conundrum.

We could have made it work, yes, but with the chewing uterus and a sick kid, I decided to just bag it. With age comes physical indignities, yes, but also the ability to pick the hill you want to die on. This wasn’t it.

Besides, I reasoned at the time: an extra day off will only make Saturday’s nine miles easier.

Which it did, I guess. It wasn’t the best run ever run by a woman in her 40s training for the Pittsburgh Half Marathon but it wasn’t the worst, either.

It didn’t start as well as it could. I’m going to give you a pro-tip here. You might want to write it down. If you turn off Herr Garmin’s GPS whenever you run inside, which you’ve been doing more than you’d like this winter, remember to turn it back on when you start your long run.

What tipped me off was my lack of a mackerel around the first mile marker. What is a mackerel, you ask? It’s an idea we stole from a mutual friend. My husband and I call that “ding-ding” noise that the car GPS makes when we do what it wants us to our “mackerel,” because sometimes you just feel like the machines are turning you into a trained seal.

(But we love our machine overlords and would never, ever want them to direct us into an abandoned field where they would have their way with us. Just putting that out there.)

Right around where I should have gotten my first mackerel ding, I got nothing from Herr Garmin. When I finally stopped to look at him, I realized my mistake and swore a little bit. So all of the electronic logs note that it was an eight mile run but I know that it was truly nine.

My neighbor has tapped his maple. This is really how we know winter is drawing to a close.

My neighbor has tapped his maple. This is really how we know winter is drawing to a close.

On the run, I took note of the signs that Spring is really, really, no-foolin’ on its way. There were birds tweeting. I saw a bunny hop across the road and some green shoots poking out of one of the few remaining piles of dirty snow. One of our neighbors has tapped his maple, which isn’t code for something naughty but a sign of warmer days that help the sap run.

The Boy is feeling better now, too. It seems it was just one of those wandering cruds that moved quickly. I’ve now, of course, started obsessing about my period and the half. What if my body decides to bring on the tsunami that weekend? And am I the only woman who worries about this?