Last Place Runner

I had two 30-minute runs scheduled for Sunday and today. Yesterday was really warm and windy, but not windy in a bad way. So I woke up and got ready to run.

I did pretty well for a long time. Well, no, not a long time. But for 15 or so minutes. Then I had to stop and stretch my calves. Yuck! It was hard to keep my focus after that and I ended up really frustrated. I put in all my time, although not all of it was running. I wasn’t even sure if I should mark it off the training schedule I keep on the refrigerator.

We got a little bit of an ice storm overnight. It woke me up around 3 or 4 this morning. I wasn’t feeling great and I just wanted to sleep for the rest of the year. Less than a month is not asking too much! But I got up at 6:15 and I DID NOT want to run today. At all. Ever.

My team at work usually has a conference call with our boss in California on Mondays. It’s really difficult to manage because it starts a 1 p.m. and it is usually on a different floor in a different conference room every time. So getting to lunch and back and to my desk and figuring out where the meeting is makes for a hectic afternoon. But the meeting had been rescheduled for later in the week and I was more or less free to take a long lunch. My team of writers has not been able to work for more than a week now because of holiday stuff scheduled for the ecommerce site we work for. Funny, right? But we had all our work done weeks ago and everything else has been on hold to make sure Black Friday and Cyber Monday items deploy without crashing the site.

So, as bad as I hated to, I decided to suck it up and get my run in during lunch. I didn’t want to run outside because — after nearly turning on the air yesterday — it is 24 degrees today and the roads were slick in places. So I changed clothes and did a treadmill run. It was uneventful, other than my calves feeling tight at first. But I kept going because finishing that run meant I had made it to THE TAPER.

And that’s what I kept telling myself. My next run will be 20 minutes, then the run after that is 15. Then, hey hey, it’ll be time for another race! Sadly, though, there’s only one more group run. We’ll get our race packets Wednesday night and the next time we see each other will be at the race!

Of course, now that it’s over and I’m resting tomorrow, I’m so glad I ran. I’m always glad I ran, even if I’m not really feeling it. But this was the first time I just did not want to. And I basically told myself, “Well, too bad.” Now it’s done!