One week down, Eleven to go!

It was soooo hard to drag myself out of bed at 5:30 this morning to go running. Even as I chugged coffee on the drive to the gym, I was struggling to keep my eyes focussed! Still, I knew I wanted to stick to this darned training schedule! I threw my stuff in my locker and headed outside. Turned on my garmin, set it to start my daily workout….

uh, I thought I had 8miles with 10x100m strides. Luckily (??), my garmin knew better. Today was an 8mile run with 4 @ LT pace. EWWW! Two years ago when I used this training plan, I didnt mind these runs. Now, Leah and Jason have me dreading them since they hate them so much! I already wasn’t feeling great and now I had this workout to deal with! Thankfully, I was already committed, standing outside the gym at 6:15am, so I decided to go for it.

I’ll admit, it wasn’t pretty. The warmup was slow and I even stopped a few times. Yes, I sat down on the curb and just zoned out. I’ll admit that at 2.5 miles I considered just calling it a day, but I knew if I didnt do the workout at that time, I wouldn’t get to it this week. I told myself to try, and I could always quit if it was too hard. With that ‘escape route’ in mind, I set off. I wanted to run the 4 miles at about a 7:30 pace, but somehow I managed to mess up my garmin so that it didnt beep when I ran offpace. I tried to keep referring to it, but until I download my results I dont have a really good sense of how I did. I know at some points I had 7:18, at other 8:xx. It felt pretty good, however, especially in contrast to how I felt when I was plodding along in my warmup.

I finished the 8 miles in 1:10. Now I’m tired, but I’m very proud I buckled down and did the workout I was supposed to. I also sat down and reserved the hotel for Scranton — emailed Doug, and he just booked the same place! Now I’m extra excited about Oct 7th… I’ll just have to find the marathon toaster!!