Morning Run

Hello. Well, I ran this morning. I set my alarm for 5:15 and then woke up at 4:50 and decided I didn't want to run, so I changed my alarm back to 6am. But then I lay awake in bed agonizing over the fact that I ate a huge piece of ice cream cake yesterday (while watching the very exciting . . . needlessly exciting I'd say, Yankees game) and the fact that tonight I'm going to Riverdale 360, a huge tasting event at work. The school is bringing in a number of incredibly famous restaurants to serve food as a sort of fundraiser/community event. I can't wait! Rumor has it that Mario Batali will be here. Tim Zagat (a Riverdale Alum) will be hosting the event and I think I'll be eating a great deal of delicious food tonight.

In any case, I was in bed thinking about the race I'm going to run on Sunday, about the fact that I hadn't run much last week (a 2 mile week . . . this is really pathetic), the fact that by June 1st I need to be comfortably at a 20 mile per week base, and the fact that people have now started asking me, "How's the marathon training going?" so I got up to run. Sunday's race is only a four miler and I'm not at all concerned about finishing it, I've been running four miles plenty lately, it's more the fact that I've never run an NYRR event at a pace slower that 8 min/mile and it's not looking good for Sunday. I'm going to try, but I'm a little nervous about it. As far as the influence of my friends on my running, I have to admit, I'm glad people are asking me about it. After all, this was the whole point of the blog . . . to have a public record of my running so that if I was not living up to my goals, I would be really ashamed. In fact, I've already not finished one goal - to run the half-marathon grand prix . . . I have missed one, maybe two of those events already. I think I'll be better off trying to run the half marathons next year once I've already trained for and run a full marathon.

So today, I did a nice morning run. I ran up to Fort Tryon Park and ran around the paths there and up to the cloisters and back. It was a short run, maybe 3.5 miles, and only 28 minutes, but I felt pretty good and after today's run, I'm a little more optimistic about the race on Sunday. I also liked Fort Tryon. It was pretty dark, so I couldn't really appreciate the park's full beauty, but I did like the paths and the views of the GWB from the park. I also saw a skunk . . . that was kind of cool/worrisome. I really didn't want to get sprayed. I have managed to avoid getting sprayed so far in my life and I don't really want to start now.

So this week feels like an unofficial start to my real training. I'm going to increase my mileage somewhat this week (probably going to get to 12-15) and the weather will support me in this goal (it's supposed to be gorgeous this week) and I'm running my first NYRR race of the year, starting to collect my nine so that I can run the marathon again in 2009!