Modest victory from jaws of defeat!

Really I've just been working too hard - Fridays always require a massive effort of willpower (four cases in our morning meeting and then four chair reports in the afternoon - it's basically at the outside limit of what I can do, even though I have an unusually high capacity for workload!), and then I was working so crazily yesterday too almost until midnight....

Anyway I've had two good nights of sleep in a row but as I headed out for notional long run I felt discouraged - had taken allergy medicine that left disgusting aftertaste in mouth, lungs still very raw because of all these wretched flowering trees, general feeling (as I wrote in an email to Brent earlier) that in the grand scheme of things if given the choice between doing a long run and eating a piece of cake I would fall down fairly easily on the side of cake.

I really almost called it at the 15-minute mark - had reached Central Park and started toiling up Harlem Hill and just couldn't do it! Switched to a walk and was thinking about bailing altogether. (It's also quite warm, mid-70s and already a little too hot if you're running in direct sun.) Then I channeled my delightful running coach and thought - you know, if I do the whole loop and just do a mix of walk-run, jog most of the time but switch to a walk on the longer hills, that's six miles, plus a mile each way to and fro - walk-run will make that up to about two hours and it's not going to kill me! David will be MUCH happier if I do that, even if it's mostly walking, than if I don't even try.

And that was what I did. The funny thing is that though inevitably there were quite a few stretches of walking, I don't think the total workout was as different from a normal current-slow-speed long run as you might think - my body probably doesn't really know the difference, especially given that I'm not training for a run event just now.

Anyway: 1:51 run-walk, maybe about 8 miles with hills - in this case, VICTORY!