Frantically Fresh Friday

I went to bed last night feeling a little curious as to how my legs would feel today. During my rest day, my legs get a breather and are able to tell me how much of a jerk I am to them, and feel a few extra aches.  My hammies were a bit tight yesterday, due to the hill work, and I thought that might linger into my run today and would have to just do an easy run.

Wake up at 4am today. No tightness in the hammies, yay! Drank my coffee. 4:20, I feel kinda ready to leave. But after that fiasco with running trots a couple weeks ago, I waited. There was that light feeling that if I wasn't going to run, would be nothing. But knowing that 30 minutes is the safe zone for coffee, I walked around for 10 minutes and history taught me well.

When I woke up my wife also warned me that she thinks it was raining. Check weather, storm just passed, another one on the way around 5-5:30. After the last time I got caught running in a downpour and fried my phone, Jennifer recommended to have a ziplock baggy on hand to throw your phone into. So this I did, and my new armband is supposed to be waterproof. (Spoiler, the bag and the phone were both dry at the end of the run).

4:40am, step outside, start stopwatch, and go. GPS was searching for signal, so I would give it until I reach the start of the Lakefront path before I decide to give up on it. It picked up at that point thankfully. Today's plan called for 7 miles at marathon pace.

Last Friday my first pace mile was all wonky, be it need for a longer warm up or GPS signal error. After a recommending from Lindsay that a longer warm up has helped her, I decided to try it out today. I'm glad I did as my calves were a bit tight, so the long warm up helped them. I did a 2.4 mile warm up and then went at it. Right when my phone told me the distance marker, I pulled in for a dorky line from 300 to try to spark some adrenaline. And then the rain started, and the thunder, and lightening.

The initial deluge felt something like this:

I thought about turning around, but remembering what the radar looked like, the storm cells were small and moving fast. The storm would end by the time I got home. The next common sense option would be to get to some better cover. Yea, I was hitting my pace, and common sense didn't make it into my thoughts. The rain gave me a surge of energy to feel more like this:

I obviously have the common sense of a anime character.

Now for the run pace stuff:

The first .4 miles weren't recorded, but it was done at warm up pace. Marathon pace started at mile 3. My times were about 10 seconds or so too fast on average. Mile 6 was were I turned around. Miles 8-9, I couldn't hear my phone over the sound of cars driving on a wet Lake Shore Drive. I was just running by feel. I wasn't raining for a bit now, so I took out my phone for a moment to check to see if it was even working, I was about to hit 9 and move into cool down. I heard my pace and said woops. I'm not sure if I'm just pushing too hard or what. This is close to a strength run. I'll try to slow down more next week.

The benefit of running in the rain, the gnats were washed out. But I swear they are related to the Phoenix, since once the rain ended, they were back and hungry for suicide. Their grave, my neck.

And since there weren't any photo worthy skies while it was dry, here is a complimentary pic of my tot from the other evening:

Happy Friday Everyone!


Edit: I forgot to reference my title in my post. Storms were like a free shower. You get fresh in a frantic pace. Get it?