I had a bad day at work today. I had one of those days where you honestly ask yourself if your boss was stoned when he hired you because you're so completely and utterly incompetent. By the end of the day, given a map and a flashlight, I don't think I navigated my way out of bed it was so bad. So I decided to "run it off" when I came home. Cherry Blossom is in 1 1/2 weeks, so I figured 6 miles shouldn't feel too bad. My target time for Cherry Blossom is 95:00, so I figured I'd try to run 9:30s today. When I was about a mile from the end, I realized that I felt like hell. So of course I start panicking. "If I feel this bad now, after 5 miles, how the hell am I going to run 10 next Sunday? Crapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrap..." and so on and so forth for the last mile of my run.
Now, I decided last year that I like running more when I bag the watch, so I don't actually know how I'm doing while I'm running outside of how I feel. But I do have my iPod, so when I got home, I figured out how many songs had played on my iPod, added the times up, and figured out why I felt so crappy by the end of my run. Instead of running 9:30/mi, I averaged just a little under 8:45/mi.
It was totally a bi-product of the shitty day, but it gave me a good laugh. And at least I feel a little better about the race next weekend now...
3 comments:
Bummer! Well, not a bummer about running too fast, because that is always cool. But gees, you and Al and your "watches are for suckers" mantra :-)
Wow - that's almost a minute per mile faster than your projected pace. I think that rocks!
On a long run, since I don't carry any iPods or anything, the best possible measurement I have is clocks that I see before and after the run. But since neither the clock in my car nor the two in my kitchen (microwave and stove) are anywhere *near* correct I'm not in a habit of paying any attention to them unless I really think about it.
I just figure if I'm focusing I'm running Plenty Fast, and if I'm spacing out or ranting about things or writing music I'm probably running significantly slower. And these two things, you know, need to be balanced to make it through a long run.
But yeah, I know all about the feeling of futility at work... that's been the last two weeks for me. I've been hacking at this stupid bug and just can't figure out what it is, and it's blocking me from working on development that needs to be finished before I move (if it doesn't get finished it's not my headache, but I would feel really awful because the headache would belong to people that I respect).
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