7 Miles? Are You Crazy?

I have been dreading this day.  7 miles.  Holy Crap.  The most I had ever run before was 5 miles and I thought I was going to die.  I would have blamed it on the altitude, but I was 15 feet above sea level.  Hmm...must be me.  I was supposed to run 6 miles last Saturday, but I got assigned a 3 day trip for Friday evening.  Since I had already run 2 miles Friday morning, I went back out and ran another 4 just to get the mileage in, but even I know that's not the same as running 6 miles all at once.

The forcast was for a high of 45 degrees and 80% chance of rain.  When I woke up, I looked outside and the ground was dry and I even saw a patch of blue sky.  Things are starting out OK!  I had my standard "running breakfast" of Special K and a banana, got dressed, digested, stretched, and went outside.  I should have looked outside again.  It was 40 degrees, winds 10-15 kts. and raining.  Nice.  So much for things going my way.  Luckilly, my wonderful wife, Deeann, had bought me some cool cold weather gear, like a long sleeved running shirt, running pants, a wind breaker, and even gave me some light knit gloves just before I left for Newark, so at least I felt prepared...that is until I got about 100 yards from my door, then it got cold.  It is a half mile walk to the park where I run, which is a great warm-up normally, but my metabolism hadn't started up yet and I was freezing Menards off.

Oh well, since I was there I might as well get on with it.  Besides, running might warm me up!  My plan was to go slow and steady and get as many miles in as I could.  Time wasn't important, but of course I was going to keep track just for reference purposes.  Feeling a bit sorry for myself I began my run, but knew I would be able to get some sympathy later from Deeann or my friend Kari...oh wait, Deeann was running a 10K at the same time, and Kari was biking 150 miles across Oaklahoma at the same time...can't expect any sympathy there, I guess I'll just have to suck it up.

The park I run around is a rectangle that is .2 miles on 2 sides, and .1 miles on the other 2.  It actually works pretty well with the intervals I run/walk so I don't have to constantly look at my watch.  Like I said, I wanted to run slow, and particularilly start slow which is what I need to do for the half marathon.  It took me 8 minutes to finish the first lap: talk about slow!  It's a good thing I checked though, because it's hard for me to count too many laps, so if I lost count I could just divide my total time by 8 and know I would be pretty close.

After the first lap I started to warm up.  Off came the gloves.  After a mile, it was time to unzip the jacket.  At 1.5 the jacket came off, and I would have taken my pants off if I wasn't worried I wouldn't start again. I couldn't believe how much warmer it got outside in such a short time!  Why do I have all these stupid clothes anyway?  At 3.1 miles (5K) I checked my time and it was 39:45.  What?  I ran my first 5K in May and finished in under 35 minutes!  (It's about distance stupid, not about time)  True, but still a little disheartening.  Then I realized I probably had another hour to run.  This sucks.

It wasn't all bad though.  I knew Deeann was running at the same time too, and that was sort of cool.  The sidewalks weren't crowded.  I got to listen to lots of music at high volume.  At 5 miles, I still felt OK and realized that I had kept my intervals of run/walk constant as opposed to the last time I ran 5 miles and by the end was walking more than running.  At 6 miles, I realized I was going to make it.  At 6.2 miles (10K) my time was 1:19:45 only 15 seconds slower than the first 5K split.  At least I'm staedy!  Time to kick up the speed a bit.  At 6.6 miles, I had run half of a half marathon.  I actually ran 7.1 miles because I still had a little gas left, and my time for that last mile was 10 minutes.

Wow.

Walking back home, I was struck by how much colder it suddenly got in such a short time.  Thank God I had all those wonderful warm clothes!

I'm not sure which is more difficult: the physical effort or the mental effort.  It's a lot of work either way, but also rewarding both ways.  It's really nice to see the training paying off, and it certainly feels good to get that run behind me, and I also enjoy the feeling of accomplishing something I wasn't sure I could do.  The best part though; Tomorrow is a rest day!  Hooray!