Ever Have One of Those Days?

I had a great long run on Saturday where I just ran for time. I needed to at least get in 20 miles and ended up running for 3:17. 7 more minutes than my goal of 3:10. The longest long run I did before Marine Corps 2008 took me about 3 hours – so I am hoping come race day those extra 17 minutes of running will help me. I still however woke up Monday morning feel like I was completely out of shape and couldn’t run a mile if you paid me to. I skipped my morning run from lack of motivation to run and push two little people. When my husband finally came home from work it took me about 2 hours to muster the energy to even get out the door for my ‘easy’ recovery run.

Whenever feelings of self doubt creep in I try to combat them as fast as I can so they don’t create a pattern of feeling that way. In order to squash my out of shape/slow feeling I putzed up to the track to run a mile and see if I was indeed out of shape or if I was just feeling sorry for myself because I was tired. 4 laps – 1 mile – 6:10. 6:10 is the fastest pace I have ever looked down at my watch and seen! I was so pumped that I thought to myself – try it one more time – see if you can get that time even lower. 1 lap – I decided I had given it my all in that last mile and there was no way I could repeat that performance. Time to finish up my ‘easy’ run. All in all the miles before and the miles after that 6:10 were miserable. But I can say I’m really happy I got out there and I’m still really pleased about my mile time.

Coach George sent out an email this morning containing this quote. It seemed rather fitting considering how I have felt lately.

“Marathoners wake up in the morning feeling tired and go to bed at night feeling very tired.” – British Olympian Brendan Foster