Mind Games

Wow…today was one crazy busy day at work, and tomorrow looks to be much of the same. I was once again running late today and I opted to take the $17 penalty and drive into town and park. I was pretty late leaving the office and sitting in traffic on my way home had me questioning my decision to vehemently drive standards over automatics and any energy I had left was draining the closer I got to home. But I had at least 5 miles to knock out tonight and I didn’t want to bail, but I could feel a total stonker coming on. I needed some mental motivation outside of the usual encouraging phrases I say to myself on my run. Things like – “slowing down is for sissies…suck it up…you show that hill who is boss.” Right.

I really don’t talk a lot about the whole running with music thing on here at all, but there was a day when I didn’t think running without music was possible. After all, if I paid too much attention to how far I was running, then I might not make it, and music always proved a useful diversion. At times it was a pain though – like at the Pacific Spirit Run in 2001 when I was running with my trusty Walkman but I forgot the tape. Who wants to lug a silent Walkman around? (I pr’ed that race though…) Or at the Sun Run in 2006 when my trusty mp3 player froze up at the 3 km marker and I had to lug a silent mp3 player around. It wasn’t until my first run in Calgary when I hit the pathways and I found out that you had better pay attention to the bikes whizzing around you or else… I then decided I was going to try this running thing au naturel and until this evening I hadn’t looked back.
Tonight I needed that diversion, so I grabbed the shuffle and headed out the door to Edgemont – the ridiculously hilly neighborhood nearby. It is a pretty quiet pathway, so no worries about dodging cyclists tonight. For the first half a mile I wasn’t convinced that the iPod was going to do the trick though. But then all of a sudden I found myself in a race with a roller blader….and I was winning. From there on out it started to get better and I was having a blast. The reason why I like running Edgemont is it is a great bargaining run – another mind game. I always tell myself on Mondays that I’ll run 5 mi, but if things feel good I’ll stretch it out to 6 mi. With the first half of Edgemont being mostly downhill I always seem to stretch it out to 6, which makes for an uphill slog all the way back to the car which I figure is probably a good character builder for San Francisco. I was grooving to the tunes and the hills were blowing by. And then I hit mile 5.37 and all that uphill running caught up with me. I thought I might get an encore of the sushi I had for lunch. Yikes. Thank goodness that was the second to last hill and it was another downhill cruise to the end. So there we go, 6 miles in the bag.
Oh, and as for the iPod thing – I loved the diversion and I think it really did help to avert a stonker, but otherwise I don’t miss running with music too much. Once I hit the really long back to back runs I may need to pull that trick out of the bag though, because that will be a lot of one on one time with just myself.