Oh dear, I must confess that it was truly awful! I offer as explanation rather than excuse that I have had a very stressful and sleepless week, and it clearly showed in terms of the fortitude I was able to summon this morning (not much).
Should have been 14, could only quite eke out 13 when it came down to it (with some bits of walking, too, which I am not very happy about). My rational evaluation is that this was a sufficient approximation of the workout I was meant to have, and that I will now move on...
(On the bright side, no real trouble from the tweaky muscle - I could feel it for the initial miles, but just as a bit of extra tightness, and I will continue to be careful, but it wasn't bothering me.)
I met training partners C. and L. at 8:30 at Tavern on the Green. It was a DIRE morning - upper 70s and humidity that I am hyperbolically going to estimate as 99%! Not actually raining, but water just dripping out of the air - I was soaked to the skin with sweat before I had run a mile.
It rapidly emerged that I was not going to be able to hold their pace comfortably. I spent the first three miles very doubtful as to whether I was even going to keep running at all. I started feeling a little better around mile 4, but only to the extent that my thinking was now something more along the lines of OK, I think I can gut it out at this pace till we finish the six-mile loop, but after that I'm going to have to send them off on their own and settle into a significantly slower pace if I want to have any hope of finishing this run.
Once we were back at Tavern, I did just that - we took off in opposite directions and I met back up with them just north of the 102nd St. transverse on the east side. We ran (I straggled!) back the way I'd already come, round the north end of the park and south along the west side - C. peeled off at 86th St. and I sent Liz ahead again after another self-assessment.
She had 13 on her schedule but had kindly agreed to add in the extra bit to make it up to 14 (i.e. run down to Tavern, which makes it twelve, then back up to 96th and turn around and back down to 86th, which is the park exit closest to our usual brunch spot), but when it came down to it it simply did not make sense - I felt like I could barely finish the last part anyway, and did not have the heart to do another mini-loop out-and-back-type bit to make up the total mileage. We just met back up at 86th St. (I expect I was not really running that much slower than she was, it just felt like it!) and went and got some breakfast.
So: 13 utterly horrible no-good miles. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
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5 comments:
The humidity is outrageous. I did yoga at home and was dripping on my mat. So really, you must not blame yourself. When I used to live in Washington, DC, I would run all summer in paroxysms of self-loathing at my inaptitude, and then September would come, the humidity would lift, and I would discover that I was quite an adequate runner after all.
Your backing-and-forthing while counting miles makes me grateful for the uninterrupted seventeen miles of running path we have on the lakefront here in Chicago, where every half mile is marked. If you put in 600 miles on it in the course of a summer, it can get a bit monotonous--and it's no Central Park to begin with--but its simplicity does allow the mind to drift to other things.
But you got out and ran in spite of it all. Which actually takes a considerable amount of fortitude.
No hyperbole in saying 99% humidity today! I was dripping before I even got to the end of my driveway.
Sounds like FL conditions! I'm glad to hear you had no muscle problems, though. Really, 13 or 14 miles doesn't matter that much in marathon training, I think.
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