8 Mile Run - Am I in Trouble, Coach?

March 2, 2014
8 Mile Run - Am I in Trouble, Coach?

Today, I ran 8 miles!    Woohoo!  Hooray!  Yippee! 

A few weeks ago, my "coach monster" (see previous post) decided to assign workouts by minutes instead of miles.  I had been getting frustrated because at my pace, the 4-mile runs during the week were taking so long and were interfering with life.  So, wise man that he is, my coach monster decided to assign workouts in minutes, rather than miles.  Today, I was supposed to run for 90 minutes.  I ran for 135 minutes.  Am I in trouble?    My coach monster will be nice about it, but I'm sure that my next set of workouts will say "NO LONGER" in bold font!  And I think to myself, why am I working with a coach if I'm just going to ignore what he says.  Silly me.

I know the best athletes are coachable.  They trust their coaches follow their direction.  I do trust my coach.  My logical side knows that he'll get me where I want to be - and without injury.  But sometimes, it's just so hard to run slower than feels natural (zone 2) or shorter distances than I want to run.  Other times, I want to say, "You want me to run how far!  Are you crazy!"  And sometimes, I get a little stressed when I'm running 6 miles and the mini-marathon that I want to do is only seven weeks away.  It's hard to be coach-able!

So why did I run so long?  Today was a distance run and I was getting bored with the flat route that I normally run near my home so I decided to drive 45 minutes the town where I used to live and where I did my first walk on my first day of Couch to 5K.

My husband went with me so he could visit our former hometown too.  He dropped me off at the interstate and I ran toward town.  After running about a mile along a road, I ran on a "People Trail" that took me into a woods.  After running about another mile, I came to a barricade.  Now what?  Luckily, a couple was walking toward me on the other side of the barricade and I asked if I could get through.  "Sure," they said.  They lied - kind of.  Technically, you could get through, but the cement trail was washed out by a nearby river and I ended up walking for 10 minutes in 4 inches of mud that threatened to suck off my shoes!  And . . . there were at least a half dozen (no exaggeration) BIG fallen trees that I had to climb over.  Other people had climbed over them too and they were covered with mud.  I laughed out loud as I imagined what I looked like - a 60-year-old woman plodding through the mud in the middle of the woods and climbing over trees.  When I finally emerged from the woods, I had at least 10 pounds of mud on each foot.  What a hoot!  I love adventures!

Once out of the woods, I was a couple of miles from my old house so I decided to run there - about 6 1/2 miles total.  How cool to think I could run from the interstate to my old house!  That was a LONG way.  As I started down my street, I was filled with all kids of emotions.  I remembered how I couldn't walk to the corner without stopping and how I used to hold my husband's arm when we walked to take some of the load off my feet.  I thought about how far I had come and how many blessings in my life enabled me to get where I was.  So blessed.

After retracing the steps that I took to the corner on my first Couch-to-5K walk, I decided to re-trace my first 5K walk too.  So next, I ran to the mall which was 1 1/2 miles from our house.   That meant my total miles was 8.  8 is a lot closer to 13.1 than 6.  I was sore (shins, metatarsals, hips, rear end) but it was a "good sore." 

Wow.  Who would have thought that I could run all over my town - Interstate, downtown, through the woods, to my old house, and to the mall.  Amazing.  Need to go somewhere?  No problem.  I'll just run there!  What a sense of freedom!