Don't Underestimate Me Or It'll Cost You!

So the DH underestimated me big time which, in this case, turned out to benefit me greatly.

You see, there is this watch I have been obsessing really wanting since I got back into running a couple months ago.  Since we moved to CT I have been running consistently (hallelujah) but I have no idea how far it is that I am running.  I have been going by times and have been gradually increasing the time that I am able to run but I have no idea how far I'm going.  To many this would be no big deal but for me it is driving me crazy, almost literally!  I have discovered that I am a person who needs to keep track of distance.  In my crazy mind I end up convincing myself that maybe I just run slower now but am not covering the same distance that I previously could.  Illogical?  You bet!  But that is how my mind works.

Now you may ask why I don't just drive the route I run and use that as a rough estimate.  Well I did with one of the loops, so I'll run that now and then just to be able to know how far I went.  The problem is that I get tired of running the same loop over and over and over again.  Considering 1 run consists of running that loop 2 or 3 times, if I do that for 4 runs it starts to become very monotonous.  When I run I usually run through the same neighborhoods but different routes each time.  It would be improbable for me to drive every possible route that I've run.

Also I am considering training for a half marathon at some point in the not too distant future.  Come March we will be moving to Hawaii and I will no longer have to contend with winter or cold temps so it would be perfect.  There are no shortage of scheduled runs there either.  Anyway, the majority of training plans (if not all) use distance and not time so it wouldn't even be feasible unless done on a treadmill which is not going to happen.  Some of the runs maybe, but not all of it!

In comes the Garmin Forerunner 305 .   I discovered this watch in the wee hours one night when I couldn't sleep.  Naturally I spent a couple hours on runnersworld.com reading through dozens of articles and forums.  I then decided that a watch with GPS would be the solution to all my problems.  Then I would be able to track how far I ran, every time I ran!  This watch is reasonably priced, gets great reviews and has proved to be quite accurate, so I've been lusting over it.  A bonus would be all the other crazy functions it has.  If I ever started to take this whole running thing more seriously I could monitor my heart rate, track my pace and all sorts of other crazy things that are beyond my comprehension right now.

Fast forward to Sunday night when I was complaining to the DH, yet again, about how I have no idea how far I run or how far I can run.  When I was finished he, rather smugly, said "Well when you can run 5 miles then I'll buy you your watch".  Now, maybe if he would pay more attention to me when I talk to him or would be more interested in my hobbies then he would have known that it was very probable that I could run 5 miles.  I routinely run 2 or 3 miles at a clip and had just run the 3.3 mile trail loop full of hills at the local coastal preserve only 1 short week ago.  Not to mention the 4.5 miles I had run a couple weeks ago.  In his defense, 5 miles would be the most I have run ever (aside from 1 crazy run over a year ago).  Logically though, given all those other points, 5 would not be out of the question.  I know he was secretly hoping that it would be something that would take me a while to accomplish.

Loving a good challenge I got all geared up after the kids went to bed and hopped on the treadmill.  With the watch as my motivation and some football on the tv I started the long journey to the 5 mile mark.  I have not run on the treadmill in over a year so that was a change.  I had almost forgotten how hot I get with no air flow.  The first couple miles were (dare I say) easy, I would say up until mile 3.  I guess that makes sense.  Around mile 4 is where I started getting overly warm and probably dehydrated since I didn't think to grab a water bottle before I started.  My bad!  After kindly asking the hubby to get me some water and turn on the fan I regained my focus.  Ok, maybe it was more like after I attempted to guzzle some water while running and spilling it all over myself and the treadmill, I regained focus.  I didn't start to feel too miserable until around mile 4.5.  I was getting so close and I think my mind knew that so I started to really wear down but NO WAY was I stopping, I was almost there!   It took forever but I finally hit 5 miles!!

Now at this point most normal, sane people would stop.  After all, the 5 mile mark had been reached so why go on and torture yourself anymore.  Well because I'm Alicen and my mind likes to get me into trouble.  I hit 5 and didn't die so then my thoughts go to "Well you want to do a 10k and your so close so why don't you see if you can make it to 6.2, then you'll have done a 10k".  So I keep trudging away, I actually turn up the speed because, as stated before, I had been running forever and wanted to get there as fast as possible.  Much to my delight I make it to 6.2 but do I stop there?  NO!  I start to think that I should just keep going until 6.5 because that's a good stopping point and again I'm so close.  So the machine stays on and my legs keep going.  Do you think I stopped when I hit 6.5... of course not.  Because then I start wondering if I can make it to 7.

Well, by the end of the night I ended up running 7 miles.  Seven frickin miles!!  This is exactly how people get into trouble.  I only needed to run 5 miles to "win" my watch and yet I convinced myself to run an extra 2 because I'M SO CLOSE!  Not to mention the fact that I ran the last 2 much faster because I had been running for almost an hour already.  Don't get me wrong, I am still astonished that I was able to run that far, honestly I had no idea.  Now this was on the treadmill so I probably couldn't run that far on pavement, outside with the hills although after Sunday night I'm starting to wonder how far I could push myself.  At any rate I've come so far in the past 2 years.  I have never been a runner and 2 years ago could only do a mile, maybe 1.5 miles but I felt like death after.  It would take a couple hours to recover, my legs would ache for days and I would never dare run 2 days in a row.  Now I can run a pretty good clip and still feel relatively normal when I finish.  My legs are hardly sore and I only came away with a sore toe and a tiny blister on the other foot from my 7 miler.  I guess most surprising is that I felt good enough that I  could have run the next day, though I didn't have time with it being Halloween.

We'll see where I decide to go with this whole running thing but I know one thing for sure, the DH is going to be much more careful with his bets from now on!