New "Longest Run"

I awoke at 4:45 AM to the sound of birds chirping and the earliest scraps of sunlight peeking through the window.  I covered my head with my pillow and tried for what seemed like eons to get back to sleep.  At 4:46 I got out of bed and got dressed for my run.

I sneaked downstairs as quietly as possible (which is hard to do on those squeaky stairs).  I put on the coffee, found my running shoes, and I swear it took me the entire time the pot was brewing to put them on and tie the shoes.  "This is proof", I thought, "that there is no life before coffee".

I poured myself a big bowl of Cheerios, and then just stared at it blankly.  The thought of eating food just soured my belly.  I decided to go down to the basement and fire up my gaming computer.  I played a couple quick missions of "City of Heroes", a game in which I get to wallop bad guys across the skull with a large stick with absolutely zero social repercussions.  After a while I dragged myself away from my cathartic bad habit and went upstairs to eat my Cheerios and start my day.  I debated over another cup of coffee, but thought better of it and headed out the door.

I was feeling a bit sore and sluggish, nothing new really, as most of the time the first couple of miles feel exactly like that.  It was at mile 3 when I still felt stiff that I started wondering what was wrong with my legs.  It took me a while longer (the brain is completely non functional this early in the morning), to realize that the reason I was sore was that I had run in a 5k race the day before.  I wanted to come in under 30 minutes in that race, so I pushed myself hard.  I ended with a time of 28:54, and came in #222 of 443 runners... dead middle of the pack.  I was quite pleased with that time (9:28/mile) as my marathon training pace is significantly slower at roughly 11:30/mile.

I ate my GU chomps at miles 5 and 9, and finally started to loosen up at mile 10.  Holy cow, 10 miles of thinking "I am not going to make 14 miles today", before I finally felt like I was going to make it, ugh!  I ran out of water at mile 13, so I may need to switch to my 4 bottle belt soon, especially as the weather heats up.

I wear glasses, but not when I'm running.  They tend to fog up or jostle around on my face, and generally make me uncomfortable.  They would have, however, prevented that stupid bug from slamming into my eyeball at mile 11.  Those little suckers hurt!

I finally stopped running when I got to the little loop in my neighborhood, looked at my watch, and realized that I was just over 14 miles.  I walked the last little bit (a quarter mile maybe?) home, unplugged from my iPod, and listened to the birds.  Overall it was a good run, I felt strong, like I might have been able to pull off 15 miles, but I decided to play it safe and leave that for another day.