Fitting In

After Sunday's little moral victory, I was really excited for my Monday morning 5K. There was one little problem, though.

Twenty miles makes your legs hurt like hell.

So, even though I was awake, I didn't get out of bed for my Monday morning run, figuring that if I waited until later in the day, I could shake some of the rust out of the muscles and really give it a go. But, as often happens, life intervened.

My wife asked me to help her with a little errand. She wanted to go and pick up a new desk so that we could finally set up the office in our house. Both of us work from home, and we wanted to have two desks in the same room for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, at the end of the day, sometimes you need to be able to shut the door and walk away.

We figured the whole operation would take about two hours. We had to drive to her sister's house to get a bigger car, then up to Ikea, back home, back to the sister's, and then home again. No problem.

No problem, of course, if there is no traffic. And if there aren't accidents on every reasonable passage through town. And if things are easily marked and in no way idiotically organized at Ikea. Needless to say, it was not the quick out-and-back that we'd hoped. About 4.5 hours later, we finally got home. Now I had a bit of an issue. I was really hungry, but I had a meeting in about an hour and a half, and I didn't have time to both eat and run between when we got home and when I had to be there. I chose to eat. There was no point in trying to exercise with no food in my system.

My meeting (of course) ran long, so I ended up getting home kind of late. I had two options: I could run right then, or I could do two runs the next day. While two workouts in one day is not ideal, neither is working out right before bed. I figured if I were to head to the gym that late, I wouldn't be able to get to sleep any time soon, and then I wouldn't have been rested enough to do the 6 miles that I need to do today. So, I have opted for a two-a-day.

The first step in that was getting myself out of bed on time this morning. There is no fighting it today, I had to work out in the morning, because I already have a workout scheduled for later. I thought for a minute about pushing everything back a day and just skipping my Wednesday rest, but I see from the forecast that they're predicting freezing rain tomorrow, and, well, that's just not happening.

So, up I got, and after stalling for 20 minutes while someone else finished his run on the treadmill, I got on. I'd stretched out and warmed up my muscles as best I could, but I knew today was going to be really tough, so I had to psych myself up a little bit. Today was the day that I outran the treadmill. I hit Quick Start, 10.0, and I started running.

Mile was was pretty brutal, particularly from .25 to .75 while my legs tried to figure out just what I thought I was doing. And yet, pretty soon, my legs fell into a comfortable pace. While it was by no means easy, I was able to maintain that pace without too much of an issue, and I was able to defeat one of my interim goals.

I'm not quite celebrating yet, mind you. I've still got 6 miles to do this evening, and I'm very interested to see how my legs will respond to that. They feel better right now than they did when I woke up, so I'll take that as a good sign, and I'll choose to be optimistic for this afternoon.

And I'll hope that doesn't change.

Today's Run (1):
Indoors / Treadmill
3.1 Miles
18 Minutes, 37 Seconds