Mother Nature's Wrath ... and Four Miles

I've been intending on getting a four mile run in before my race, which so happens to be this Thursday and is sneaking up quite quickly. Considering doing a four miler the day before an 8K isn't really going to help me build miles and feel more comfortable with the five, it seemed glaringly obvious to me that I had to get it in today.

I put both kids down for nap and just trusted that the Nap God(s) and Running God(s) would work together for me. And if these gods do exists, they did work together. I got four miles in, a shower, ate a cupcake and am blogging ... and the kids are still snoozing.

I have a feeling they felt bad for me (and the kids) because Mother Nature pulled a doozy on us this morning. We head out for a nice walk to Starbucks and while we are in there the skies grow dark. I got out as fast as I could and about 1/3 of the way home rain came down like I've never seen before. The wind was whipping so hard that tree branches were coming at us and debris was flying from a local home construction site. The kids were screaming, think Nightmare on Elm Street type screams. They were horrified. I honestly was afraid for our safety. I ran the two blocks home, with kids screaming as they were pelted with wind and rain. The little guy, in the front of the stroller, got the brunt of it. I got home and had to run around the tree limb that had fallen across my sidewalk to get into the house. The neighbor came out and helped me get my kids into the house.

We now have the other half of the tree (that didnt land on the sidewalk) delicately balancing on our house.

Down the street a tree the same size as ours fell the other way, and closed off the entire street for the day. The quote the Chicago Tribune, "Thunderstorms packing winds of 75 mph knocked out power to about 817,000 Commonwealth Edison customers this morning, the biggest outage from a storm in at least five years."

The thing is, we were out when the storm started. It took a minute of the storm to take that tree down ... if I was a minute earlier we would have been under it. So, overall, its been a pretty lucky day :)