Kicking it Up a Notch

Workout: 6 miles, 9:21 average

Pictures from a much nicer day 

It kind of looks like the apocalypse outside right now. Think wind and rain. Think nothing like the pictures above. We can't get warm winter temperatures in Anchorage without terrible wind. Fortunately, I saw this all coming so ran earlier in the day. It was pretty hellish up where I live, but totally fine where I ran. Hardly any rain at all!

10 mph wind my ass. It's also 38 degrees right now. Lies!

My fancy plan had me doing a "10k" today, which I decided to interpret as "4-mile pace run with warm-up/cool-down miles." Close enough. I'm not actually running a half marathon at the end of this thing (I'm just using the plan to up my miles in a safe way) so it wasn't that important that I run faster, but I decided to give it a shot just to see what it felt like to kick things up a notch. Turns out it was kind of nice!

I didn't go all out or anything, just tried to speed up a bit. My breathing was pretty in control (although it was getting a bit ragged towards the end), but the speed didn't feel too out-of-reach. And if I hadn't had Bailey with me, I would have gone significantly faster. After mile 3, there was a fair amount of stopping, slight backtracking, and a pee break after 3 miles (side note: it's SO NICE not to have to worry about finding bathrooms on a run, one of my biggest fears in New York-nature is my bathroom!).

Shins were pretty sore at first, but they went away and seem to be doing fine now. It was definitely nice to get outside before this terrible weather started. It's supposed to continue into Monday morning, so there's that. Good thing I have some grad school apps to finish!