Who am I?
I voluntarily went for a run today –
Outside on the road, up hills even! Well 1.75 hills (because I had to walk up the last quarter of College Hill) BUT that is still more than 1 hill thereby making the use of a plural totally legit.
Even the rain that started falling from the sky as soon as I left the building didn’t deter me, I just figured God was laughing so hard at me that he cried .. I’m just glad to have been of service to him, everyone (including spiritual beings) needs a good laugh now and again.
I had half heartedly tried to talk myself out of going outside, in the rain to “run”, I mean there is a perfectly good treadmill at Ludus I could have used, but we all know that running on the road is a totally different beast and since I’d had a shite time running around the bays on Saturday and then an ever more shite time running just under half of that distance on Monday it couldn’t get much worse surely ..
Oh! I just realised I haven’t told you about Mondays run yet, so here is an uber quick run down.
Issy has a hula hoop class at Victoria Park on a Monday and since I can’t run this Saturday (which I’ve designated as a running day), I figured I’d get in a short run while she was in class and then do a longer run later on in the week.
What a nightmare it turned out to be! It was hot, my tights kept falling down because I had my phone in the side pocket, my bluetooth headphones kept cutting out and the Nike+ Running app lost me – lost me! And to make matters worse, because my running app lost me it turned off my music and all I was left with was the sound of my heavy breathing! #sigh Thankfully my old and faithful Garmin had my back and dutifully recorded my pitifully slow 3.9k run – to be fair it’s actually quite hard to run a decent pace whilst constantly tugging at your pants.
So like I said, today’s run HAD to be better – right?
After talking to Anna about Monday’s miserable running experience I took her advice and made sure I wore something comfortable. Thankfully I can fit my shorts again as although I hate the way my legs jiggle they are still the most comfortable thing to run in and to be fair, I can’t see myself run anyway so it’s only the people I pass that have to contend with my jiggling. I borrowed James’ armband thing to put my phone into and made sure the headphones were charged up.
AND it worked! Well the headphones cut out with about 800ms to go which slowed me down while I fiddled around with both my phone, running app and headphones but I’m not sure it was enough of an annoyance to swap to corded headphones …
Don’t get me wrong – I still hated the actual running and if you could get better at running without you know, actually running then I’d totally do that! But, I had many small victories along the way, like running up Newton Hill (which I was quite sure I wouldn’t be able to do) and only walking the last section of College Hill. Sure I may have stopped at the lights with my hands on my head trying to get my breath back until the little green man said it was ok to cross (safety first and all that) BUT otherwise I ran “the entire way”.
I’m pretty sure I would have ended the run that wet even if it wasn’t raining. 😉
Till next time
