It Wasn't Pretty, But I Did It...

I said I was going to go for a run this morning, and I kept my word. It was only a mile, but this is the first mile that I've run since October so that has to count for something.

Let me back up a bit, and then I'll get to the run....

If you read yesterday's post, you know that I have been following my friend's progress as he trains for a 10k. We chatted a bit yesterday and he got me motivated to get back into it. I told him I was going to start by going for a short run in the morning. I was pretty excited about it. This was all during my normal work day. Unfortunately, Wednesdays are my day from hell for the week and I don't get to go home and relax at 5 pm. I had to go to class until close to 10 pm that night. (More on this in another post.) As the night slowly passed, I started thinking more about how tired I was going to be in the morning and how I was not going to want to get up and run. But every time that thought came into my head, I told myself to stop whining and deal with it.

So I get home from school right at 10:00 and my amazing boyfriend had dinner waiting for me. I know, eating at 10 pm is not ideal, but when you work from 8:00 to 5:00 and then go to class from 5:30 to 9:40, you don't have much of a choice. So we had dinner (baked cod, roasted squash and zucchini, and cous cous), watched some TV and talked about our day. I think we made it to bed a little after 11:00 and I crashed.

When my alarm went off this morning, I got up surprisingly easy. I tip toed out of the bedroom so I wouldn't wake Mike and got dressed in my running gear that I had remembered to set out before bed. I leashed up the mutt (this really is a term of endearment in my house--we absolutely LOVE this creature.) and headed out into the cold. We did our normal walk around the block to get his business out of the way and then I started the Garmin and away we went. I think Roman was a little shocked when we didn't make the turn back to home, but he quickly got over it and fell in stride beside me. He really is a great running buddy...as long as there isn't a soul around to distract him.

We finished our slow mile in right at 11 minutes (Ugh...I have a lot of work to do to get back in to the groove) and then walked the last couple blocks back home. I'm glad I misjudged the route a little because I needed those blocks to convince my lungs to stop screaming from the shock of the cold air. I probably could have gone further than a mile, but it's been so long that I didn't want to push it too much. I vividly remember the pain I felt while pushing through the Army Ten Miler and I don't want to deal with that again.

I'm not going to run tomorrow. For one, I want to access the situation and make sure my back is healed like I think it is. And the other reason is that Friday is the one day of the week that I don't have morning mutt duties. So I'm going to take advantage and sleep until 6:00. I do have Saturday off from my part time job, so I'm already planning on another run then. I might even push it up to a mile and a half!