Last night Charmaine and I rode our trainers for an hour. I took it somewhat easy, knowing that I had to run today. I felt pretty good afterwards and good again this morning. I’m still not sure if that played into my terrible performance today, but I don’t have a lot of other excuses, so that’s what I’m going with.
Wanting to avoid another confusing map in RunKeeper, I decided to make sure my iPhone believed I was starting from the right spot. Nope. It thought I was about a half mile away again. I had to fight with it for about ten minutes to convince it I was here and not there before starting my run. Maybe that played into my difficulty?
Excuses aside, I felt pretty good starting out, but by the time I hit the first corner I realized that my cadence was too high and my stride was too short. In other words, I was just spinning my wheels and not really going anywhere. I tried to step it up a bit going up the first hill, but my suspicions were confirmed at the 5 minute mark when RunKeeper announced, “You are behind your target pace by 14 seconds.” That wasn’t nearly as motivating as finding out I was ahead of my target pace. I tried to push it after that, and I did get ahead of my target pace for a bit, but that last mile just took me apart. Still, I’m happy to have finished with a decent time.
Maybe I’m not quite ready to add that 4th mile.