The long (and short) road back

Today was my first run on a workday. Woo!

It was also a very brief run, only 2.5 km after a three week layoff. It was about 7ºC, overcast with some light rain. I wore a jacket and long-sleeve t-shirt and may have been okay with just the t-shirt as the wind died down just prior to the run.

Some notes:

• I was recovering from the effects of some bug (felt kind of like the flu, sucked all my energy away for a couple days like some kind of sparkly vampire in germ form)
• the conditions were the worst I’ve ever seen. Many stretches of the trail were little more than mire and multiple times I felt my foot twisting on the uneven surface. A lot of exposed roots, too, as the continued heavy rains strip away the surface.
• annoying jogger duo. A pair of women were jogging ahead of me and stopped at the playground. They were apparently doing a start-stop thing. A little ways after passing them they resumed running and kept pace a modest distance behind me. No big deal. Except one of them would not stop yakking.It made me crazy. On the one hand, if you can carry on an (incessant) conversation while jogging, you aren’t trying hard enough. On the other hand, if I was in better condition I could have easily outpaced them and gotten out of hearing range, so I also suck. I am hoping to remedy this by running again on Friday with a ‘run as far as I feel comfortable’ plan (up to 10K). We’ll see how it goes.

No official™ chart for this run because it was such a quickie but here are the relevant stats:

1km = 5:10
2 km = 5:23 (yuck)

Total average pace: 5.28.

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