The weather has finally warmed up enough to melt most of the snow on the streets around town. However, the melted snow turned to ice during the night so it was slow going this morning. It didn’t help that I was incredibly crabby when Ruger and I started out. I was completely overdressed, the left leg of my running capri was riding up over my knee underneath my pants, one of my socks was sagging and there was a gap between my glove and the coat sleeve on my left hand. Mom, Dad, you can rest assured that I never outgrew my bad sock days.

So, we started out for a slow warm up with me being crabby and Ruger freaking out because he kept hitting every possible ice patch and scrambling to keep from falling on his face. The streets are pretty dark in the morning, but well-lit compared to the sidewalks. It was also trash day, so there were random garbage cans cluttering the sidewalk that seemed to jump out of nowhere. The ice was worse on the street and I was wearing all dark clothing, but the amount of cars out early in the morning is pretty minimal so we stuck to the street anyway and jumped on the sidewalk as needed.

I don’t normally count my warmup as part of my miles but today’s run was supposed to begin with a 1-2 mile warmup and there was no way that I was not going to count it. It would have been too depressing for my fragile state of mind.
Things went well until I sped up at 1.6 miles and Ruger immediately stepped on a goathead. We stopped to get it out, ran a little further and then had to stop again to re-tie my shoe, ran some more and hit the longest ice patch ever on the darkest street possible, ran some more and Ruger had to poop. In short, it wasn’t exactly the fast 1.5 miles that it was supposed to be. We hit it hard when we could but I not sure how much good we did since we were constantly stopping.

We finally made it home at 4.2 miles and we were both relieved.

Miles:4.2
43 minutes
10.14 min/mile(I’m convinced that this is solely due to 5 min of walking during warmup and various slipping/sliding/trying to stay upright/awkward walk-run over ice that followed and not my natural slowness)
Today’s plan: Warm-up 1-2 miles, Tempo 1.5 miles, Cooldown 1-2 miles
What I did: Warm-up 1.6 miles, Tempo (or rather, attempt) 1.5 miles, Cooldown 1.1 miles