My Monday is coming to a close, thankfully, and I've put off posting through forgetfulness and business until now. But, I'm here now, and that's what counts, right? Right.
After a so-so work week in terms of my ability to get up and out the door in the mornings for my runs, I was determined to make the weekend worthwhile and I succeeded. Friday, as I last wrote, I totally failed to wake up and instead hit snooze without a tinge of regret. The regret would come later in the day when I felt guilty for not exercising like I was supposed to. At any rate, I then tried to will myself to run after work but the weather was nasty (heavy downpours here in the city) and it just didn't happen. I vowed to get runs in on Saturday and Sunday, with Sunday being 3 miles at a long, slow pace. I feel foolish labeling such a run an LSD run because 3 miles is not distance in the grand scheme of distances, but for now, it'll have to do. I'm determined not to give in to the temptation to try a 5 or 6 miler and get injured like I was back in July. I'd rather feel like I'm not running as far as I think I could and not have any injuries.
That being said, I got up and out the door on Saturday around 9:30 for a quick 2 miles. Nothing special about it, although the humidity was high (it's August in Baltimore so it's been miserable for about a month now.) Sunday I got up and out the door around 10:30 for my run. It was cooler and drier out, so that made the run better. I headed from the apartment south along St. Paul St all the way to the harbor at Pratt before hanging a right and heading back north along Charles St. That's the most difficult part of any route down and back to the harbor because it's a challenging uphill run all the way from Pratt to Mulberry St (I guess maybe half a mile or so). I ran much of the way, which was good, and then hung a left at Mulberry and a right onto Cathedral heading north again before looping back to the apartment.
I wanted to keep my pace reasonable and slow to avoid having to walk too much like last week when the hills of Calvert St killed me. And aside from walking to cross Lombard St and for about 15 seconds farther up the hill, I didn't have to stop. I thought that probably meant that my pace was somewhere around 10:00 or so. On these short runs, I've just been using the stop watch on my Swiss Army watch rather than my Garmin so I don't have the live pace data.
I got back and put my run time and distance into my log on Running Ahead only to find that I was well below 10:00, like more than a minute below. I was shocked because I felt OK after I finished the run and not totally exhausted. So, my LSD run really never materialized, apparently. But that's not a bad thing because it means I'm making progress and that the slow and steady approach is paying dividends gradually.
This week I'm bumping up the weekday run distance to 2.5 miles with a fartlek run planned for tomorrow and Thursday and an easy run on Wednesday. I want to run three days in a row and take Friday off because we're heading to Michigan for a wedding on Friday. Then I can take another crack at actually running an LSD run the morning of the wedding on Saturday and rest for the travel day back to Baltimore on Sunday.
Now I just need to get my ass out of bed tomorrow morning to stay on plan!
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