My brain was mostly empty today as I reluctantly headed out for a 14 mile long run. I tried to fill it with positive thoughts or think of creative workouts because I'm working my training plan today for most of my season.
But all I could think about on this cool and rainy spring afternoon was how I didn't want to be running right now.
It started out achy and tired, still feeling my trail run earlier in the week and feeling my overnight shifts and crazy schedule earlier in the week.
I started thinking about how I'm always happy on perfect weather days spent training with good friends having fun. While these are great days and one of the reasons I love this sport, they suddenly didn't count as great training days.
I understood this moreso on a wet Sunday running miles and miles alone. Great training days happen when you want to quit or even never start but you follow through anyways. It's easy not to quit with company. When it's just you and some long, lonely miles it's a victory to be miserable and not take the shorter route home, to not quit because you don't want to.
Fighting the workout despite your results and pulling something positive out of the experience anyways. That's a great training day.
I ran today, I didn't feel fit or even fast. I felt pretty miserable and I was soaked and cold for 80% of my run. Despite feeling like junk I managed to keep on par (by seconds) with my best half marathon time.
From this kind of awful run today I pulled a pretty good conclusion that if I feel good on race day (even just a little better than today) I will PR, hopefully by a significant amount of time. It's just a half marathon, but it's an important step for me beginning my season and I'm pretty excited to see what I can do this year.
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