Notes
Today I was a wheenie.
I woke up and it was absolutely pouring down rain outside, and the weather reports showed no sign of it stopping any time soon. I had a short window of opportunity to run today, and the morning was going to be my only option. I did not at all want to walk out the door, solo, in an absolute monsoon. I might have had a little more mental fortitude if I had only been going 3-4 miles, but I knew I needed 10-12 to hit my mileage goal this week, and this was the day and time it had to happen.
So I went to the gym instead of running outside.
Lame, I know. However, I'll justify it by saying my days are filled with nothing but paper writing and finals studying right now, and I need my running to be as much of a break as it can be. There was not one ounce of me that wanted to go outside, and I wasn't willing or capable of fighting that mental battle this morning, knowing there are many more mental battles to be fought over the next four days, and given the many I've fought over the last 4.
Inside it was. And I spent 10 miles trying to keep myself entertained, in entirely random ways.
First I played a game with myself to see how long I could make my warm-up. I knew the longer I could prolong the warm-up, the faster time would go once I got to any kind of workout, and the shorter the treadmill cool-down afterwards would have to be. I think I got in about 3.5 miles of warm-up before I couldn't take it anymore.
Second, I decided to alternate between half miles "hardish" and half miles "easyish". The easy was 7:30 pace, and the hard was 6:30 pace. I did that for about two miles, and it felt good, and then I got bored of it.
Third I thought "hey, that 6:30 pace feels pretty do-able right now, so lets just throw in a mile of that and see how that feels." So i did that, and it felt good. Maybe call that a mile at tempo pace- ish.
After a few minutes of recovery after that I thought about doing another one, but didn't really want to do another mile-length piece, because my attention span was waning, so I decided to do a mile-length piece but split it up into 400's at increasing paces. I did it this way: 400 at 7:15 pace, 400 at 6:45 pace, 400 @ 6:15 pace, 400 at 5:45 pace. That all felt pretty good, and the last 400 definitely felt hard, and like work. The mile went by fast though, and that was the goal.
After that mile piece I had 2 miles left to go to get to 10 miles (I had already decided I was going to be on the 10 side of my 10-12 mile goal for the day, because I just wasn't going to make it on that freaking treadmill that long), and I thought "surely I can set the pace back to about 7:40 and have a nice, easy 2 mile cool-down, and I'll have the attention span for that.
Nope.
I got about .75 in and thought "OH MY GOD IM NEVER GOING TO MAKE IT."
So then I threw in another random 800 at 7 min pace, just to give myself something to think about.
Finally I had about a half mile to go and just ran easy for the final 3-4 minutes.
The extent to which I was playing mental games was hilarious. And I wish the running commentary in my head pertaining to other people in the gym and their strange habits and routines, had been recorded, because I'm certain it was worthy of publication.
I lost one mental battle this morning, and perhaps won another? I don't know what I would consider this run. However, it happened, I felt good, and I will hopefully still accomplish the mileage I set out to accomplish this week
Happy Friday.