Saturday, August 24, 2013

When all your runs are slow, what's a bad run?

There's a really lovely island park, Belle Isle, near my home.  There are small but lively beaches, a wicked fun water slide and a golf course - all of which I've taken advantage of.  The island is also a pretty perfect round track that I decided to give a try a few days ago.

My question last post was whether or not hotter temperatures and bad scenery squashed my mojo and worsened my runs.  This particular 7-mile island run was pretty gorgeous and since the parks were pretty quiet I got to share a few nice words and high fives with runners, walkers and cyclists (save for a few back road minutes that were boring and lonely) but it was REALLY.  EFFING.  HOT.

HOT.

I left home at 9am so that I could get running by about 10 after and even with almost 5 entire miles of water only a few feet away from me it was hot and humid and not at all breezy and I'm lucky that damn island is round because if I didn't have to get back to my car I'd have quit at least 10 times.

Phew.



I finished.  7.2 miles, bridge entrance to bridge exit and felt pretty beast mode when I was done. Mostly, though, just because I was done.  Even for a slowpoke like me my time was pretty poor.  Almost 1:30 for the 10K and 1:45 for the entire thing.  Almost 15 minutes per mile, a lot of which were walking thanks the many, many awful heat induced feels.

I only ran twice the rest of the week because I was feeling so terrible after that run.  At least it helped me learn the lesson that I need/want to work on not only endurance (and with that, speed) but also my own motivation.  I hope that after my next bad run I'll be motivated to do better next time rather than feel bummed and wanting to quit.

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