Saturday, September 02, 2006

hurricanes do not a terrible running environment make

last night we got a "weather advisory" from our coach saying that if it was thundering or "as bad as they said it was going to be" practice would be canceled and to use common sense. i was really hoping it wouldn't be, because i felt bad missing a day this week already, and i needed the mileage.

the wind started pounding on my rickety windows around 2 am, which didn't make for a great night's sleep, but i stumbled out of bed at 7:15 to check for an e-mail cancellation - there was none. it was lightly raining, if at all, *very* windy, but no thunder. what to do? my body was calling for me to go back to bed, but i held out and sent a text to charlotte to see what she thought. she called and we decided we were up, we might as well go for it and we could always run anyway if they had cancelled.

a wise decision - practice was not canceled. our assignment for the day was 5 miles, either the upper loop (72nd all the way to the top of the park and back down the other side to 72nd) or the lower loop (72nd up to 102nd street transfer to the west side, then all the way down to the southern end and back up the eastside to 72). the major difference is the massive hill on the upper loop - if you go east to west, the hill is shorter but really steep; if you go west to east the hill is not as steep but is quite a bit longer. we were going to do the upper loop, but by the time we got to 102, we thought it would be better to just do the relatively flat 5 and keep track of our time.

the crazy blustery wind gusts (when they were not blowing against us) were actually really refreshing after i warmed up, and the rain stopped about a 1/2 mile into the run. the weather made me feel *tough*. it was fun. i can't tell you how thankful i am that i'm actually enjoying running.

as it turned out we got back in about 62 minutes, and when i mapped out our route, we actually ran 5.37 miles not just 5...so today we were *under* a 12 minute mile. for all my talk in my last post about not caring about time, this made me happy, and quite proud.

today's mileage:5.37
total mileage: 47.02

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