Comfortably Hard

An oxymoron for sure, but that’s the only way I can describe Saturdays’ 8 mile run with Cyndi. Mind you, it was comfortably hard for me but probably comfortably easy for her since her base pace is approximately a minute per mile faster than mine. It didn’t seem like I was pushing the pace, not that I could have done that today, but as long as I didn’t talk, my breathing was at a steady state. Once I started talking, I gasped for breathe.

 For a change of scenery, we started at Joe’s Crab Shack as usual but headed to the Long Beach bike path until we hit four miles then turned around to finish the second half. More people run on that path than on our usual route so it was good to see quite a few runners. I had to apologize to Cyndi towards the end because that was the best pace I could give her.

For some reason I’ve been feeling out of sorts the past few days. I could only attribute that to all the unhealthy food I’ve been eating during the past month with all those potlucks we had at work. Not only that, I’ve been overdosing on jelly beans the whole week, so I think my blood sugar was spiking and dropping erratically. I finally threw away the rest of it in the trash when I got home.

When we finished the run, my right ankle was hurting badly and I had to walk it off until the pain subsided. It felt ok while we were running but the moment we stopped the pain was intense. Maybe because it was the first time I wore the over–the-counter Heel That Pain orthotics past six miles.

Well that’s it. Comfortably hard it was, though the overall pace was surprisingly slower than my last couple of 4 minute run/ 1 minute walk intervals. But then again, that was only an hour duration. I’d rather be conservative while running non-stop than hurt my ankles badly. Thanks to Cyndi for slowing down for me the whole way. I’m becoming dependent on other people in doing longer mileage so I appreciate the company very much.

Postscript: About an hour after we finished, a rainstorm passed through. We got lucky we missed it, otherwise we would have been drenched specially that we weren’t wearing raingear.

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