My apologies for butchering the song by The Carpenters. I woke up at 5 o’clock Saturday morning to get ready for a run with Cyndi at 6:45. When I heard the wind blowing and looked out the window, I saw the rain pouring in buckets. I waited half an hour and sent a text message to Cyndi asking if we should cancel the day’s run and she agreed (thank God!). At about 6:30, the weather cleared a bit so I went out to the store to buy some produce and jelly beans (what a combination, huh?) before it started raining again. Would you believe it, but the sun came out so I was faced with the dilemma of whether I should run or not. I could have easily stayed home and gone with my back up plan of doing the stairmaster and stationary bike. But after seeing someone running, I decided that I should try it myself if the weather held. What really finalized my decision was seeing some palm fronds on the street blocking one of the lanes so drivers had to maneuver around it. I thought I’d do the community a good turn* and run to that location to clear the palm fronds. If that’s not a good reason to go out running, then I don’t know what is. I planned to take it easy and run for just 4 to 6 miles instead of the 8 I was supposed to do with Cyndi. Even though I tried to slow the pace down, I still struggled towards the end. I must have not recovered from Thursday’s run yet.
So let me tell you then about last Thursday’s run. I was going to write about it in another blog post but since I already mentioned it above, I might as well address it here too. I’ve always wondered ever since I started doing the Galloway method if it was still possible for me to run a 10k in under an hour. I wasn’t planning on racing against my GPS watch, but rather just running hard and see how it turns out. All I concentrated on was running hard for 4 minutes, then walking for 1 minute until I reached an hour and it was only until then would I know how far I ran after I turned off the stopwatch. I couldn’t believe the result when I first saw it but it was right there on my wrist in plain sight: 6.34 miles in one hour! That happens to be a 9:28 pace. My pace for an hour run using the Galloway method has been dropping in recent weeks from 9:49 to 9:43, and now 9:28. As long as my ankles don’t suffer too much from the pounding of running harder, I’m loving it! Hence, I attribute the difficulty of the Saturday run to not having recovered from the hard effort from Thursday. There, I found another excuse. First the palm fronds and next the exhaustion. The excuses to go out running after the rain and the result that followed.
* Do a Good Turn Daily: This is the slogan of the Boy Scouts. Some Good Turns are big - saving a life, helping out after floods or other disasters, recycling community trash, working with your patrol on conservation projects. But Good Turns are often small, thoughtful acts - helping a child cross a busy street, going to the store for an elderly neighbor, cutting back brush that is blocking a sign, doing something special for a brother or sister, welcoming a new student to your school. A Good Turn is more than simple good manners. It is a special act of kindness. (Excerpted from page 55, Boy Scout Handbook, 11th ed,(#33105), copyright 1998 by BSA, ISBN 0-8395-3105-2
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