Tonight’s power music was, I know, SO CHEESEY, but it was two songs from the Rocky movies. Survivor’s “No Way Out” and the song that played during the Training Montage of Rocky IV. (Yes, they have been put on here before, but the Training Montage bears repeating.) For the song by Survivor, see the post immediately below this one.
Training Montage
I started out thinking I’d be following the FIRST plan of doing 7 miles. First mile supposed to be “easy”, then 5 miles at marathon pace, then the last mile at “easy” pace. This doesn’t account for the DISGUSTING HUMIDITY FACTOR that we had tonight. We’ve had rains off and on tonight and after it rains, at first you think the humidity level has gone down, but really it bounces back with a vengeance and gets even more disgusting. (Today started at a humidity level of 85%, by the way, making our 75F temperature feel a lot higher.)
So let’s see. The first mile tonight was in the pouring rain. That made my shirt basically weigh a few pounds extra. I ended up running the first 2.6 miles, then having a mini “I can’t do this” attack, then me snapping out of it when No Easy Way Out and the Training Montage came on.
Tonight, when I saw the hills I purposely had planned to run up and down, instead of thinking “oh my ‘expletive deleted’ God” I thought “Attack! Attack!” and it actually really helped. Tonight’s course was kind of rolling in the middle, which I found I enjoyed for the pure variety, and I know I need to get used to running on surfaces that are not always flat.
Ok, you all know how I love my Camelbak, the pink Mini-Mule, right? I do, I really do. However, whenever you need anything, you have to basically stop, take it off, and get your crap out of the pocket. This is not normally a problem. I’d try to do it while running, but then I’d have to worry about hitting the bezel on my Garmin 405 (LOVE THAT THING) and oh, can’t you just see me with all my High Maintenance Gear?!
So, I ended up running into the dark a bit. Shouldn’t have been a problem, after all I had brought along my headlamp in case this happened. I tried to turn it on (again, had to stop to get it out of the Camelbak storage compartment) and what happened is that one of the batteries had, unbeknownst to me, fallen out. So I couldn’t get it to turn on, it was getting darker by the minute, water was literally rolling off of my hat in the 150%+ humidity (I am exaggerating, yes, but not by much in the aftermath of our showers/storms this evening.) So I just said “screw it” and ran back home as fast as I could so I didn’t die by being hit by a car, for the last 2.6 miles.
Altogether, the run was 7.97 miles, and it took an hour and a half. I think I had my watch going even when I stopped, because I KNOW I was running faster than I normally do, and running somewhere in the range of 10 minute miles or less for the beginning part of the run. The last 2.5 miles or so were definitely faster – so that’s what I am counting as important for me for this evening, that it felt great to be out there and running. Hard to believe on Saturday I’m going to be running almost twice as far, but I’ll deal with that when I get to it. It’ll be cool to have run 14-15 miles before it even hits noontime, don’t you think?!
