I had to do my long run today due to the family weekend trip to Brussels. I knew there is no way I could take 3 hours to run there, not to mention I wouldn't even know where to go, so I decided to rearrange the workouts a bit this week, giving myself slightly less stressful day yesterday (800s intervals were originally scheduled for yesterday), and just go for it today.
I got inspired by Paul's article to try running with my iPod. I never run with music, I can't stand anything bouncing on me, dangling cords, earphones falling out of my ears and having to readjust all this stuff. But I had to wear FuelBelt with water and gels anyway, so I got my iPod as well, as an experiment. It wasn't going to be an easy run and I figured I could use all the distractrion I can get! Well, in the beginning I did hate it, but after about 5 miles I found a way to tuck the iPod into the FuelBelt so it didn't bounce and the cord was mostly out of the way. Listened to everything from Enigma to Russian rock. I ran around the perimeter of Regents Park with only 2 crossings on 2.75mi. loop, so safety wasn't an issue. I did 6 loops, and the pace was around 8:45 in the beginning, then around 9mi. Garmin lost the signal for a while, but got it back less than a mile later. I took one gel around 9mi. (probably too late), and the second gel around 14mi. I was certainly tired, but my pace actually got a little quicker. Then 2 miles from home iPod ran out of battery! Just when I needed it the most. Oh well... I was glad to be done though. Total time 2:44:04. | 