"Just One More Mile"

Monday Workout: 5 miles, 10:12 average
Tuesday Workout: 3 miles, 10:14 average

So the first day of class really was canceled yesterday (I'd link to that post but something's up with blogger). As this random picture says,

No class, which I guess was exciting, but also sheer ice. Everywhere. This picture was taken yesterday.

Here's a shot of my pathetic "neighborhood" ski resort, where I ran today. It's also pure ice at the moment.

I was sore as hell today. It may have been THE (half) CORE I did on Sunday or Saturday's fast-ish six miles, but it was probably mostly the insanely difficult five miles I did yesterday. I used a free guest pass to the fancy gym because I couldn't run until it was dark (also, did you see the picture above?), and I was kinda-sorta excited about it because running on a treadmill meant I could zone out. Well, I guess I didn't learn from those other times I ran on a treadmill, like last week or the week before, because this was even worse. I'm not sure if it was the time of day or the fact that I had recently eaten a lot of walnuts (side note: walnuts are terrible by themselves. I had to drink about a gallon of water because they made my mouth so dry), but whatever the case things started feeling rough almost immediately. I'm still pretty shocked I made it through all five miles.

I always think that the "I'll just do one mile and go from there" method is useless. To me, it's giving myself an out to finish early and assuming I'm going to fail before I've even started. Surprisingly, though, it seems to work. I guess that psychologically it's easier for me to break it up into smaller pieces. Instead of "I'm already exhausted and I've got an hour left to run," I get to think "Okay, just ten more minutes." Not exactly a revolutionary idea, but I was interested to find that it actually seems to work for me.

So I used this method to get through these miles. It wasn't easy, I had to drink infinity times more water than when I run outside (because any increase from zero is an infinite increase, right? Wrong? Hell if I know), and I felt like I was going to puke the entire time, but in the end I made it through. I guess another big motivator was not wasting my fancy gym pass.

When I woke up this morning, I could hardly move, so I did the obvious thing and ran again. Only three miles, as dictated by my plan thing, but still something. I wish I could say it made the soreness go away (seems like it does for other people), but it most definitely didn't. I loosened up while running, I guess, but I certainly didn't feel better once I finished. I'm glad I got it done, though. Plus, I ran on cement today! Not snow, not ice, but bare cement. Seems this gross 40+ degree weather was good for something.

My miles were slow:

So that's that.