Long Run Saturday

There is definitely a positive side and a negative side to trying to get your long run in on Saturday morning.

The negative is that you wake up to your alarm going, "WTF??? Why is this thing going off on a Saturday???" And all you want to do is roll over and go back to sleep.

The positive is that you have plenty of time. This morning I waited until my normally grumpy stummy was fully ready for a long run, and only then did I go for a run.

The run itself was relatively fine. I started out better than usual - no tweaks or anything. My legs were rather dead, though, probably from the hour long bike ride yesterday, so I had to constantly fight off the urge to walk. For me long runs are all about getting to the point of no return: the point where I am close enough to the end that I would feel like a loser for walking. For me, today, the first point of no return was at about 30 minutes, where I convinced myself that a long run had to be longer than my other run of the week, so I definitely *had* to eke out 10 more minutes. By the end of those 10 minutes, I knew that I could run for at least 10 more. I actually thought that OHR Week 8, Day 3 called for 51 minutes instead of the 49 that it actually calls for, so I ran 51.

Final stats: 51:20 for 4.75 miles on my regular route with 5 loops with Podrunner at 179 bpm. I was actually really pleased with my pace. I cannot believe that I ran that far and for that long and that fast. I never in my whole life would have thought that I could do this... that I could run for almost an hour. In two weeks I will run for an hour. An hour!