Resistance Training

Today, I would like to thank my dog for truly testing my Miles, Not Minutes commitment.

I really am terrible at getting up in the morning. I need some sort of suggestion on how to actually get myself out of bed on time. Part of it is that the temperature shifts so much from day to night that I always wake up cold, and the only thing that I want to do is get deeper under the covers. I know that if I snooze away those twilight hours, I'm going to have to run after work, something I really hate doing, not to mention the fact that I'll have less energy throughout the day.

I know all of this, and yet I snooze.

With all of the other changes in my diet and lifestyle, hopefully this is one more thing that I'll be able to work on. I'll look up some tricks to getting up, hopefully that don't involve waking my wife up, too.

As such, it was to be an afternoon/evening run for me. The wife suggested that I take the pup along with me on this one, as she seemed to be bouncing off the walls all day. Usually, she's my Friday run partner, but given the circumstances, I figured maybe it'd do her good to get out for a bit. Here's the problem - today was scheduled to be 8 miles. I'm quite sure the dog has never run that far before, at least not consecutively. However, with my new focus on distance, not speed, I thought we'd be okay.

As usual, I didn't check the weather.

We're having a pseudo-heat wave here in Texas, and temperatures were in the upper 50s by the time I got off on my run. For me, this was fantastic. For the pup, not so much. Within a mile and a half, she had already started to pant, and she had no interest in running beside me. I slowed down as much as I could (and still be running), but she still dragged behind me. She'd get spurts of energy along the way, like after we had to wait at a stoplight or when there was something she wanted to investigate, so I knew she had the strength. She just didn't want to run.

I did not want to do this for 8 miles, though, just in case.

So, I decided to simply continue to the turnaround for my 5-mile course, and then take her home. Why 5? Because that's tomorrow's run. I considered going for the 4-mile, dropping her off at home and then doing it again, but for one thing, that'd be boring, and for another, the whole point of doing an 8-mile run is to keep it continuous. Therefore, tomorrow will be 8, and today was very, very slow.

Which is really fine. Although I didn't feel like I got a particularly good workout in the running portion, it did motivate me to perform better in my ab and arm workouts, which went well. And I got my miles in. Tomorrow (hopefully in the morning), I'll do my eight uninterrupted on the new path a measured out last night, and I'll be prepared for Sunday's monster run when it will be, surprise surprise, raining.

The best thing about today's run was that in all my focusing on the dog's lack of speed, I never had time to focus on anything else, and I didn't have any leg pain, which is unusual for an outdoor run. Either I'm getting stronger, or I just need stronger distractions.

Or both.

Today's Run:
58 Degrees / Sunny
5.13 Miles
50 Minutes, 20 Seconds