A Tale of Two Runs

You see, it's like A Tale of Two Cities, except it's different because I replaced the word "cities" with "runs." Well, that and I might actually make it all the way through this post.

Anyway, we had 8 miles with 10x100 strides today. After going to bed extremely early yesterday (see: lingering hangover) we were up at six and ready to go...back to bed. But, we stayed up, ate some toast, drank some coffee and...totally didn't want to run. Guh. But, whatever, we went.

It started out okay if you ignore the sweltering heat. It was probably only 80 out, but it was just unbelievably humid and we were nowhere near hydrated enough to deal with the amount of sweating we were in for. But, we pressed on and managed pretty good paces for the first 5 miles (between 8:30 and 9 after a 9:26 first mile) despite the heat. We then came to our designated "run sprints in the city" place which is just one of the schools near us. There is a nice, long sidewalk there and it works nicely for our sprints. We would sprint the straightaway, walk a little bit, turn around, jog back to the straightaway, and sprint again. Repeat ten times and we were done. These sprints also went pretty well except that one point when my soul left my body (I got it back). So I would say phase one of the run was good. Five solid miles and 10 solid sprints in tough conditions.

Thus ends run one.

Run two was not so good. We still had to run 1.75 miles before we were done. If you have plans to do these sprints in the future, do them at the end of your run. Or, at the very least, leave yourself less than a mile to go. It was so demoralizing to be exhausted and have so far to go. We walked a little bit to get our breathing under control. We then walked a little bit more for good measure. Ah, what the hell, might as well walk to the next light too. A quarter mile later we were running again...until we found a water fountain! Water! We drank happily and then it was back to running.

In the end, between the last stride, the post stride walking, and the drinking (oh, and the running), mile 7 ended up taking us 15 minutes. I wouldn't call this a "15 minute mile" per se, but it still ended up taking forever. The last mile we kicked it back up to a 9 minute mile and then, mercifully, we were done.

Only three more days until the Taste! Woot!

Go Cubs.