When Is “Easy,” uh, Easy?

It’s Saturday, and given that tomorrow is Mother’s Day, I had to take my long run today. In preparation for the Broad Street Run, I had gotten my long run up to ten miles, so that’s the distance i ran today. I’m planning to run one or two half-marathons in the fall, so I want to maintain and build my base.

One popular rule for recovering from a race is to take one easy day after the race for each mile raced. In my case, though, I ran the Broad Street Run for endurance (as I suppose, given the heat, most people did) rather than for speed. In fact, I’d run better—that is, faster and more comfortably—in the weeks leading up to Broad Street. So I’m not sure that I had that much to recover from.

Getting today’s run in, I feared, was going to be tricky. The forecast had called for an early morning thunderstorm. While I’ll gladly run in the rain, I won’t run in lightning. The skies, too, had looked rather dark, presaging a storm. Yet after checking the latest forecast, according to which we were to have overcast or partly sunny conditions, I decided to head out for my run.

The sun’s initial absence led me to expect cooler air than was actually present. As I began to run, in fact, I noticed that I was feeling warm earlier than I had expected. I had misjudged the conditions. Still, I was able to run comfortably.

I did attempt to run at a slower, more relaxed pace, but I soon discovered that I had finished my first mile about a minute too fast. I had alternated between three minutes of running and one of walking, but I decided, in order to conserve my energy and force myself to run more slowly, I decided to alternate my walk breaks with two-minute runs.

My first five miles, then, turned out to be easy. I covered Forbidden Drive from Valley Green almost all the way to Lincoln Drive and back. I drank more water than I had anticipated—20 ounces—but that wasn’t a problem. Then, midway through the run, I stopped at a water fountain to refill my bottle.

One of the disadvantages—and there really are few—of running on Forbidden Drive is the tendency for pebbles bolders to become trapped in one's shoes. One must stop and empty the shoe. Given that I always double-knot mine, dislodging the foreign object makes for an unwelcome mid-run nuisance. Today, I was lucky enough to be able to empty my shoe at a natural break point in the run, but other days I've had to forfeit already established momentum at crucial points in the run.

As it turned out, I should have been more optimistic about the weather. Midway through the run, the clouds dissipated and the sun shone bright. Now my pesimsism concerning matters meteorological came back to haunt me: I had deliberately left my sunglasses and my headband at home. I was condemned to complete my run battling the sweat that continually dripped into my eyes.

I continued to feel good as I ran the other stretch of Forbidden Drive towards Northwestern Avenue. I did, however, find myself tiring a bit, and, as I reached about the 7-1/2 mile point, lead legs began to set in. But I wonder if part of my problem was a loss of mental focus: the longer I ran, the less I thought about my pace, and the greater was my tendency to run faster rather than slower. This strikes me as paradoxical: in order to maintain a less physically demanding pace, one must concentrate more. Unfortunately, by mile 8, the mental energy for me to concentrate was in short supply.

Nevertheless, I managed to regain a bit of my focus and run comfortably to the ten-mile point and then some. While I'm rather tired as I write this (due in part to slight sleep deprivation), I was pleased that the run didn't leave me spent. Nevertheless, I'll think I'll hold at about 20 miles per week for a few weeks. Then I'll begin thinking about half-marathon training.