I woke up late again this morning. I don’t know what’s going on with me. The marathon training may be exhausting me or it could be that we just got back from MN and will leave tomorrow for WI and we have been remodeling our house continuously for over a year, or it could be that Fall is here and that I have a tendency towards Seasonal Affective Disorder which is basically a low-grade depression that sets in at the beginning of winter. I figured I had it in WI because winter was so very depressing there, but I think that even though I’m in Arizona which is beautiful year-round, I think I still have some mood fluctuation every year in October. In any event if my mood interferes significantly with my work, my training, my social life, or my ability to have fun, I’ll have it treated.

My sluggishness this morning could also be attributed to the fact that I did my ‘long’ run yesterday. On my training schedule, I have one long run every week and one rest day every week. Common sense says that the rest day should probably follow the long run day, but sometimes my schedule is so hectic that I really need to put the rest day on a day when I know there is like no chance I’ll get the opportunity to run, and sometimes that means it’s nowhere near the long run. For example, tomorrow we fly to Wisconsin, leaving home around 7 am. Well, we’re not even fully packed yet, so we’re gonna be bustling around tomorrow getting ready and I know I won’t have time to run. Then we’ll get on a plane and sit on our butts for hours, then we’ll be picked up by family members and friends and we’ll visit grandparents and we’ll chat and visit with loved ones until we drop off to sleep. I’m simply not going to run tomorrow and I know it, so I scheduled my rest day for tomorrow. Unfortunately, that meant I had to run today.

Today’s run was one of my ‘easy’ ones and I really concentrated on letting myself have an easy time of it. I set my GPS to tell me to slow down if I started doing 11-minute-miles and only to speed up if I dropped below 14-minute miles. Then I concentrated on really letting myself go that slow. That’s actually kinda hard. One thing, is that it can get boring. It’s not that hard, you’re not moving that fast, and the mileage doesn’t add up very quickly, so I found myself wanting to go faster from time to time, but again, I just focused on letting myself lolligag along.

That really worked out nicely. I was never winded or sore or crampy and I never felt like I had to stop. In fact, my 3.5 miles was up about a half-mile or more from my house, so I went ahead and kept loping along until I hit 4 miles, then I walked for some cool-down. That was a nice follow-up to my long run yesterday. Although I still feel pretty tired, I don’t think I’m as tired as I would have been if I had done a shorter run at a much faster pace.