Back on track!

Statistics:
Distance: 4 miles
Time: 45:58

Stats/Track map

Observations:

Man, it felt good to get back out and running. This was kind of a put up or shut up day. After a not-so-good week as far as running was concerned, I felt like putting this run off until Monday would have been a mental slip on my part. The long and the short of it was that after the weirdness on Monday, I was less certain of where I was in my conditioning. If I was winded after 1 mile, what did that mean? And then I noticed slight but present twinges in my knees when I'd walk down stairs at work. Nothing that I'd call pain, but enough that I wanted it to go away before I ran again. Because my schedule was so busy last week, Thursday would have been the next day I could have run. But as you may have read, the weather was really ugly, and I decided not to run. I was booked up Friday night, and I had work on Saturday, which left today as my first opportunity to get back on the streets. I wanted to do something today since any delay would have been an excuse at this point.

I started out on this course, which is a 2-mile lap course I came up with. I called it the Swiss 4-mile (bonus points for the first person to figure out why I called it that). Anyway, When I started tonight I actually hadn't yet decided if I was going to do 4 miles or 6. Since it's a 2-mile course, I thought I might play it by ear and do a third lap if I was feeling saucy.

Here's what happened. I wanted to pay special attention to my pace, so I decided to run without my iPod. No music, just the rhythm of my shoes on the pavement and my breathing. I feel like that helped me keep aware of not going too fast too soon. I felt good at the 1-mile mark - much better than on Monday at the same place. As you can see on the stat page, I did the first mile in about 10:30. At 2 miles, I was at an 11:00 per mile pace. I'd slowed down a bit, but I felt good and sustainable. At mile 3 my pace had slowed again by about another 45 seconds, but I felt fine, and at the 4-mile mark I'd slowed again, but still felt fine.

At that point I felt like I could easily have done another 2 miles. I wasn't breathing any more labored, and my legs felt no worse than the 2-mile mark. Knowing I could have gone 2 more miles was enough for today. It meant that stopping at 4 miles was a conscious decision to avoid injury and not a cop-out because I was tired. So I stopped there and feel good about the run. Not thrilled at the slowdown in pace, but I do think that there is a bit of inaccuracy with the GPS that accounts for some of it. Next time I'll pay a bit more attention to my pace throughout and try to stay a bit more consistent. All in all, it felt really good to have run today and I do feel back on track after overcoming a physical and mental hurdle of last week's inactivity.


Street Shout-out:

Shout-out to my mom, who called my phone right around mile 2 to talk about airline miles and to tell me not to overdo it. ;)


Track List:

No track list tonight. Just me and the road. I may keep it like this just because it helped me focus, mentally a bit tonight. It did feel nice to know that I could run without needing music to distract me. The time actually passed pretty quickly. That's a good sign!


Next:

Thursday - 6 miles

By the way, I am redoing my schedule based on the last few weeks. Cutting down to 3 days a week to give my legs more time to rest in between runs. I think that will do more good for me long term than the extra miles on the 4th day.