Friday, May 28, 2010

A Long Run

For the entire first two hours of my long run this morning I wrote this blog post in my head. It was going to be titled "The Terrible, Awful, No Good, Very Bad, Long Run". Except when I hit the 2 hour mark and had to pick up the pace, amazingly things got a little better, hence the title change.

This is what I looked like for the first two hours. My legs hurt. My heart rate didn't want to work. I kept looking for a reason to cut the long run short. Except I couldn't find one. I wasn't injuring myself. I wasn't sick. And my pace wasn't even completely terrible. So I kept running.

And during this entire process of me feeling like I was having a terrible, awful, no-good, very-bad run, it dawned on me that this exact feeling would most likely occur at some point in my Ironman, and that this was in fact a great run because I was practicing my-legs-feel-awful running.

At two hours I picked up the pace as instructed. And my legs started to feel slightly better. Not amazing, but better. My pace and my heart rate were nowhere near where I wanted, but in week 3 of a 4 week build, I guess sometimes I can't be too picky.

When I got home I had a bloody sock. How I can run nearly 22 miles and never feel my little toe bleeding everywhere is beyond me, because just sitting down right now it hurts.

Hope everyone has a great long weekend. I will be trying not to fall of a train of fast boys on bikes tomorrow. Oh joy!