In the Dark

Not certain how far I ran yesterday morning.  Only eight miles were on the schedule, but I felt good and it wasn’t stinking hot so I started off on a twelve mile circuit.  Of course I was beginning early enough to be sure I could complete the run and still shower before sitting down to work, which meant it was dark outside.  I guess this was the reason why I suspected myself of not properly kicking off the Sports Watch.

If you’ve been following this blog you know I rarely peek at my watch while running, and I was chagrined to see it wasn’t tracking anything when I got back home.  The run went well but I was starting to flag near the end so I took a shortcut and created a unique path, meaning no previous run to look up for distance + elevation gain statistics.  Of course I used to estimate distance before the sports watch anyway, so a conservative estimate is eleven miles.  Still annoying since the estimate around elevation gain is a bit more uncertain.

Hopefully the energy levels are rebounding, because I did manage to run the entire time…and any circuit beyond ten miles without walking a bit has become a rare occurrence lately.  This potentially encouraging news is followed by another solid run this morning…albeit I was still in the dark!

I was confronted by the failure of my sports watch again, but this time the feedback was immediate.  When I tried to switch on the tracking mode for my run it displayed LOW power, making it apparent that it had never STOPPED tracking from yesterday!  Although the tracking screen had disappeared and there was no response to my attempts at both stopping and re-setting, the dang device was still expending energy to plot GPS points while sitting on my desk ever since the previous morning.  At least this absolves me from guilt for the failure --- rather than my bungling set-up in the dark, the device has obviously been possessed by some gremlin…hopefully temporarily.

Knowing that I was proceeding without the benefit of being tracked, I followed familiar paths and grunted out just shy of nine miles with sixteen pounds of additional weight strapped on.  Another pound-miles record rung up for a single run with 141 the new maximum.  Even burdened I managed to run the whole time and even picked up the pace towards the end since I didn’t feel weary.

Let’s hope this trend holds up --- I could be kidding myself but running with the extra weight already feels as though it is building up muscle.  Even if true, it is only my personal theory that this equates to improved hill-climbing ability, but we’ll continue with the experiment.