Headwind

Okay, so I’ve never run in a headwind like the one I ran into on Saturday afternoon. After a busy morning doing mum/suburb/kid things (grocery shopping/driving kid around to lessons/going to a bank opening for a pumpkin decorating gig), I headed out at 2pm to take on 8km. I was already tired and not feeling it at all, but I forced myself off of that couch (which the husband was snoring away on!) and got to it.

By the time I hit 2.5k, I decided to turn north and cut my run to 6k instead of 8. I was heeding John Stanton’s advice (paraphrased), “If you don’t feel like running, get out there for 10 minutes. If you’re still feeling punky after that, you probably are too tired to run, so turn around and go home. The beauty is, you’ve gotten a 20 minute run in.”

I was doing okay-ish, chugging along, looking at the lovely fall colours and fighting to keep my ball cap on when I saw a friend of mine driving. He stopped and yelled, “Get back to your side of the tracks!” (I do live west of the tracks from him). That completely threw me off. I tried to get back into a groove, but then that blasted (hee – pun!) headwind basically sucked my will to RUN.

I’m ashamed to admit I walked.

For like 1km.

Fortunately, that is all it took for my shame to win over and I completed the rest of the run in fine form and did the whole thing in about 40 minutes (insert standard second hand watch comment here – blah blah blah). So coupled with the headwind, I went out VERY fast (for me). It must be the cool, crisp air that is helping me speed along.

This week I’ll be on the treadmill with perhaps a Wednesday lunch time run. I got the latest issue of Canadian Running magazine and there are some treadmill training runs in there, so maybe I’ll do one of them and let you know what I think (foreshadow – I’ll think they are EFFing HARD).