Accidental Victory.

Friday was my day of rest. It felt good, but the only thing that made me feel accomplished was making my own hummus.

Today was "Long Run" day. Four miles. In my head, I had mapped out a good loop, that I was lead to believe would be roughly 4.66 miles. I wanted to push myself a little today so I did my best to hold a strong, quick (well, quick for me) pace for the first half mile, then chug along like I usually do.

I had a soft goal in mind to not walk at all, but I chickened out. So I changed my goal to jog a full mile at a good pace. First half mile was quick (and I was fairly certain I was either going to blow chunks or cough up a lung). I wasn't sure where the second half mile ended, so I just kept chugging along. I was feeling decent, a little tired in the legs, but my breath had caught back up with me, and decided to just keep going until my legs felt like they were going to fall off. That feeling came about ten feet before the street I had chosen to cut over on, so I pushed on for those last ten feet. My legs felt like jello.

Tried to keep my walking at a good "speed walk" (gotta keep the heart rate up!), so as to not counter-act the jog. As I rounded the second half of my loop, I got to thinking: "This feels like a really long way...But I'm probably just tired." I walked for a total of about seven blocks (split over three breaks) on the way home, mostly to rest my quads, and was feeling slightly guilty about it. I decided to really push the last block and a half (my home stretch block), and found myself busting out as quickly as I did at the beginning.

I was pretty sure I was going to pass out when I got to my front door. And I was fairly certain I had been on the road for FAR longer than expected. I checked the time - one hour and five minutes. Meh, kind of what I expected. I logged on to Mapmyrun.com (where I plot out my awesome running loops down to the .01 of a mile), just to see if my previous 4.66 calculation was correct. WRONG! 5.07!

I accidentally jogged an extra .57 miles. Not much to the skilled runner, but to me, lil ol' me, it's quite a victory. Oh, and that full mile I wanted to jog? Actually was 1.52.

Two victories, one jog. Not too shabby.