Tempo Running...

You know you are in training mode when the alarm clock goes off and even though all you want to do is roll over and go back to sleep, you make yourself get up to get a run in. Ugghh. This morning when I woke up, I felt like I'd rather have oral surgery than run. But, I got up and hit the pavement.

The first two miles or so really sucked. I kept thinking about how tired I was, how running the same types of routes during my morning runs in the neighborhoods was sooo boring. I couldn't think about anything except how crappy it was to be up at 5:30am running.

I ventured into a different neighborhood around mile 2.25 or so and that seemed to distract me a little bit and when I came back out of the neighborhood I was right around 3 miles. So, I decided to run "comfortably hard" (what a tempo run is supposed to be) for the rest of my run, I wanted to get to at least 5, so I knew it would be a good 2 mile tempo run and the added bonus... I'd finish faster.

And once I started running faster... I felt better. Humph. That's weird. I mean, it was comfortably hard, but I wasn't so bummed about the running. It's like I got an extra boost of endorphins or something from picking up the pace. Anyway, I finished strong and felt good.

So, I feel good about getting in mileage and a tempo run all in the same day. And no matter how hard it is to get up in the morning and run, I never regret it during the day.