Spend the Extra Hour

Sunday’s Run (11/07/10)

Isn’t daylight savings time grand?  I almost don’t mind springing forward if it means that later I get to enjoy a day with 25 hours in it.  I couldn’t be happier that I got to spend the extra hour with my handsome visitor, who enjoys spoiling me with excellent food, wine, conversation, and long walks.  We had a wonderful weekend together, and I miss him already.

But!  His departure means a return to my normal routines, including a good Sunday run since I didn’t go into the lab today (which means I didn’t do the 7-mile-ish bike ride commute to and from work).  I had planned to do a 50-minute run today, but I wasn’t feeling up to it because I was a little sad about saying good-bye to my guest.  Also, and perhaps this is not a good excuse, but I didn’t want to be completely exhausted by my run because I’m getting ready for an important presentation at work on Tuesday and I wanted to have some energy left tonight to work on my talk.  I find that I must maintain a careful balance between my work and my athletic pursuits because either one can wear me out completely.  For today, I decided to hold back a little bit so that I can give a good performance on Tuesday.

I ran a strong 40-minute run, only pausing to cross a street near the beginning of the run.  This run felt very different from the other 40-minute runs I’ve done recently; I could tell that with this one, I wasn’t pushing myself into new mileage territory, but I was strengthening my running base.  I think that’s a good thing to do, so I have no regrets about taking today a tiny bit easier than I could have.  The 50-minute run will happen later this week or next weekend; either way, I plan to run at least 30 minutes on Wednesday or Thursday so I can keep strengthening my aerobic base.

* A note about the time on the watch: that’s the total amount of time I was on my feet.  I ran for 40 minutes of that; the rest was walking before and after the run.  You can see that I reached over an hour of “foot time,” mostly because I walked for about 15 minutes after the running portion of the work-out was done.