October 8

Total time: 42:55 minutes
Total distance: 3.26 miles

Today was a perfectly lovely fall day and I had nothing on my calendar for the evening, which is getting to be a rare occurrence these days. As such, my brain made the executive decision to go for a run after work. I was pretty indifferent to the idea. It’s become a pretty solid habit, even if I am marginally lacking so me of my enthusiasm from earlier this summer.

When I started running, I wasn’t sure how it would go. The initial stretch felt good but it wasn’t long before my legs started to feel heavy. Last week, I’d mentally forced myself into running two miles – I debated whether I wanted to do it again tonight. I decided to just run my mile and see where I was after that. I’d done a lot of walking over the weekend so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I only did a mile today. 

There would be other opportunities to run the two miles this week – the forecast is calling for sunny 70s all week.

So I ran my mile route and it felt okay, but not great. I decided to force myself to do the two mile route – I mean, hey, if I do it today, that means I can run shorter distances the rest of the week. Might as well knock it out while I was here. It was a lovely evening for running or just simply being outside, so I didn’t protest too hard.

I felt myself slow down significantly as I entered Mile 2 and slogged my way through it – “slog” being the operative word. It was slow and sluggish – not terrible, but I had to pep-talk my way through it.

Then, something odd happened. As I was finishing that mile, I suddenly found my groove. I’m going to try for three! It was a decision I made without really realizing it until I was already into it. If I could pull it off, it would definitely prove to myself that I could do it, and it would make me a lot less anxious about running my 5Ks next month. I had already run more than I’d planned on, so however long I went was a bonus.

Mile 3 felt fantastic. Mile 1 was okay, Mile 2 sucked, but Mile 3… Mile 3 was a feeling I’d been missing for months. I jogged along happily and at one point I realized I’d actually picked up my pace. (My average pace ended up being Not Amazing, but I don’t think that disproves what I felt. It just meant that  Mile 1 and especially 2 were reallllllly slow). It almost felt like I was going too fast, considering that I was on my third mile, but it felt great, and I had no desire to slow down. It reminded me of one of my earlier runs from that summer, where I felt like I was Actually Running instead of just trudging along.

Honestly, if it hadn’t started to get dark at that point, I may have even kept going and tried for Mile 4. I had a burst of energy while I was walking home and randomly ran about a block at what was left of “full speed” but I was kind of bummed that it was time to go home. It’s probably good that I stopped when I did, though, because I developed a nice big blister on my left foot that was getting quite painful by the time I got home. Lame.