The Sign Said Stop

...so I did. This was this morning, at 7:09. The sun was finally coming up, after I'd been running for more than an hour. I skipped the track workout last night because I was still sore from Saturday's hilly fun (see previous post), so I felt I had to get out this morning. I did my version of a tempo run--a 1.5-mile warm-up, a 20-minute steady run at a pace between my 10-K and marathon paces, followed by a 1.5-mile cool-down (also known as getting home again). Gee. That description makes it sound like the run was scientific, cut-and-dried, efficient, productive. I suppose it could have been, might have been one of those things. The loose-cannon factor in that "tempo" formula is what's called "perceived effort." Some days my ostensible 10-K pace feels like the speed of a Nascar contender, while other days it feels like the speed of the loser in a turtle race. I check my Garmin periodically to make sure I'm on-pace, and I can only call my consistency approximate--at best.

Be all the details as they may, it was wonderful to be out in the pre-dawn world. Big, big moon setting in the west, a light breeze, a cloudless sky. My aches and pains told me that I'm in training. They also told me that the infrastructure is basically strong and getting stronger. It's all a blessing.

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