Running... as punishment.

I love running, right? Except when I don't. Take for example this morning. My alarm went off at 4:45 this morning. Which, is nothing unusual for a Thursday morning. What is unusual, though, is that I had just gone to bed at 12:30.

I immediately grabbed my cell phone in the hopes that in the middle of the night Carolyn had texted me and had cancelled our run. In which case I would have had no problems rolling over and going back to sleep. But no messages. Dammit. The next thing I did was attempt to swallow. And discovered that for the 3rd morning in a row... my throat hurt. Double dammit. Then I realized just how freaking tired I was and I recalled the events of the night prior.

There was the smokey bar. There was the alcohol. There was the fun. And there was the late night. Ugh.
First instinct? Use my sore throat as an excuse (as I did the morning earlier, legitimately) to bail on the run.

But then I realized that I needed to use this run as a punishment for going out on weeknight. That's right. Just like my mom wouldn't let me skip school the next day after I'd stay out late as a high schooler... I wasn't going to let myself skip my run. Obviously, that didn't mean that I wasn't checking my cell phone every 20 seconds to make sure that Carolyn hadn't woken up and decided to cancel. No dice.
When Carolyn and I met up, we both were bitching. We were both tired. Neither of us wanted to run. But, run we did... And at first it didn't feel good. But as the run went on... I started to feel better... we both did. By the end we added on some extra mileage. And I was surprised at how good I felt.

It started out as punishment... but it actually ended as a reward. I wish that happened with all punishments...