Wednesday, April 23, 2008 [9M]

Attempted an AT run and went 3 miles at 5:20, 5:23, 5:33. I woke up yesterday with a sore throat and a bit of headache/fever and I had been feeling a bit sick since. I went to work in the morning but decided to go back home after an hour. I ended up spending the rest of the day in bed with my laptop, trying to get some work done but being remarkably unproductive. I started feeling better as the day progressed and by 5:30PM I decided to get out for my run. I had been planning to do an AT run and after debating about it for a while I opted to give it a shot. I kind of knew that I would have a hard time running anything decent but I reasoned that an AT run would be a good option since I would run for as long as I could maintain the goal pace. Of course the flaw in that reasoning was that I was giving myself an easy way out of the workout and not really commiting myself to putting in a hard effort. I also had a fairly loose goal pace, shooting to start at something close to 5:10 but being content with running somewhat slower. I ran over to Carlmont high school and ran a couple of strides before starting the workout. I got out way too slow and was 82-83 for the first lap. At that point I decided that shooting for 5:20s would more reasonable and picked the pace enough to hit the goal for the first mile. Even though the pace was slow I wasn't feeling very comfortable and had some trouble breathing. After the first mile I started thinking of calling it a day at the end of mile 2 but I was more or less able to hold on to the pace so I figured I should try to add on another mile. For the 3rd mile I only managed to come through the half in 2:50 and settled at that point with finishing after 3. I was able to pick it up for the last couple of laps and ran the last half in a more decent 2:43. I was thinking originally of adding on a longer cool-down but after the workout I knew that any mileage I would add would be slow and painful and really not worth the effort. It was definitely a good call since for the last mile or so I was just dragging myself to finish the run. I probably should have avoided the workout all together today but I guess I've always been too stuborn to do something like that.