I talked myself into a

I talked myself into a 5K run last night after work, and it turned out great. I’d taken my running clothes to work and planned to leave at 4:30 for at least one lap of the Gilruth trail, but ended up at work until 6:00 and don’t like the run on the trail in twilight/darkness if I can avoid it. It’s very poorly lit, i.e. not really any lights at all except for the headlights of cars going down Space Center Blvd.

I went home, and was feeling lousy, but thought about my plans for the weekend and realized that if I didn’t go last night I might not run until at least next Tuesday. (Why? Because I usually don’t run on Fridays as a rule, and tomorrow and Sunday I have a soccer games, as well as needing to fit in a good bike ride for MS150 prep, and Mondays I go climbing.) So I did my standard in-front-of-the-apartment-complex 5k, which is extremely boring but convenient. My complex, unfortunately, is right off a busy, heavily traveled road that has no sidewalks. I don’t want to risk running that road at night, so I basically run one lap around my apartment complex combined with 2.5 repeats of the half mile crescent-shaped road out front. My complex is in the middle of the crescent, so I end up running to one end (where it meets the busy road) three times and the other end (where it also meets the busy road) twice. Like I said, it’s extremely boring, but it works in a pinch and I’d still rather do it than run on a treadmill.

I did my 5k in 31:40, so I was very happy with the pace. I think I was able to keep it strong last night because I had so much to think about. Tiggs wrote about her thoughts while running, and I think I’ll do the same.

I thought a lot about the possibility of becoming a race photographer, after exchanging a few emails yesterday with a local race photographer. She’s always looking for photographers to help out, and I have the right equipment, and think I could be pretty decent at it. And earn a little extra money as well… I thought about my job, and my to-do list, and my frustrations over my own procrastination; it’s like a deep hole that I just keep digging myself into, and I want to change that. I did math in my head (which, for the record, is one of the best ways I’ve found to distract myself if I need to do so while running). “I’ve done this many miles in this much time, that’s a pace of this many minutes per mile or this many miles per hour…” That type of mental math. I often try to calculate my pace to the correct second, or my speed to the correct decimal place. It’s more for the distraction than as an actual gauge of how my run is going.

Anyway. It was a good run. Afterwards, I didn’t feel as guilty about watching TiVoed stuff and surfing the web for the rest of the night.