Once again, my day started with a 4:45 am alarm. This time I dragged myself out of bed five minutes later. I spend the next few minutes getting dressed each morning in the dark by the light of my iPhone flashlight so as not to disturb Exile #2, but first I have to find out how cold it is outside. This morning it was 16°F with a wind-chill resulting in it feeling like 9°F, but knowing I was doing speedwork I dressed more for the former.
The first five miles of the fun were one of my normal loops at easy pace. I was thinking about how nice it was to run on dry roads after many icy/snowy runs and that there is so much sand at the sides of them at this time of year because it's used to treat the icy roads and ends up like a small beach by the early spring. It felt pretty cold and a few miles in, my hands started to get pretty cold despite the two pairs of gloves I was wearing.
I had planned to do the loop again, but I realised that there were several potentially difficult road crossings to navigate while running at 5K pace, so I made a risky decision to change my route mid-run. This is normally a disaster as my processing power is diminished as the miles wear on, but this time it worked out OK. I decided to run my intervals around a loop about 1.5 miles long with no significant side-roads and no major road-crossings.
My interval workout was five repeats of 1200 metres (0.75 miles) at 5K pace followed by a jog to recover (0.35 miles or approximately 3 minutes). They were hard, but I certainly warmed up doing them. You can see my pace and heart-rate in the chart. After a short jog to complete my 11 miles, I arrived home a bit tired, with very cold fingers but otherwise fine.
Stretching, showering, breakfast and to work around 8 am and now it's time to get some sleep so I can do it again tomorrow.
"Running" total: two days, three runs, 21.4 miles.
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