Couch to 5K week 2, workout 3 - Well That Sucked

Mommy running makes me tired

When I started out today my title was going to be "When your route is dictated by your children" as I had to start my warm up by walking to our community pool because one of my 6 year old's shoes did not make it home from swim team.  This was actually route I had been thinking about taking, because like last week, I wanted to make session 3 of the week my hardest and this would take me to the lowest point in my neighborhood.

But today was not a good day.  It was hot and muggy, the real feel was about 88 degrees at 8:30 and most of my run was in the sun.   This route was also going to be pretty steadily uphill for the first mile and a half, and with the stroller I was running slowly.  Did I say slowly, it turns out I was running even slower than I had been walking the last two sessions because when the first mile notice came up, I was shocked at how slow it was, almost 16 minutes.  For the first time ever I wanted to quit running before the 90 seconds were up.  I had to talk myself through each run session, but I didn't stop.





The second mile was much faster than the my first, but still nowhere near the times I had gotten on my last two runs.  I started thinking that I was going to fail if I was struggling so hard on the 6th workout, and still had 21 more to go which would eventually lead to me running 30 minutes without stop  - how would I ever be able to do that if I couldn't make it through this.

By the start of my cool down period I had worked the negativity out and decided that instead of calling this a bad day, I would call it a slow day.  I have to remind myself that not every day is going to be a fast day, especially when I do more incline work while pushing the stroller, but the most important thing is that I just keep going. I did all the jogging sessions for the full amount of time, as much as I wanted to stop..  More than that, if I had found some magic formula for dropping 30 sec. per mile every run I'd be running a sub 5 minute mile (something that will never happen) so what I had been doing was unrealistic. Thursday will be significantly cooler, which is good because there are two 3 minute jogging sessions in each week 3 and that will be a challenge.  Maybe I'll use Dory's mantra with a little modification "Just keep jogging, just keep jogging."