Okay, this just didn’t work. I pretty much knew it wasn’t going to work, but I tried it anyhow, and, what do you know, I was right, it didn’t work.

I really need to do the speed runs on a treadmill. I simply don’t keep up the proper speed on the road, and especially when the road is Las Vegas Boulevard, a.k.a. “The Strip.”

My plan was noble – give myself about 1.7 miles to warm up to speed, then run 5.4 miles at speed, then give myself about .9 miles to cool down, and that would be a total of 8 miles, double the length of “The Strip.” I told myself I’d head out from the Imperial Palace and warm up ’till I got to the Sahara, then run at speed until the Stratosphere, cross the street, then run the entire length of the strip at speed, then cross the street and keep on going until a certain street name I can no longer remember, then walk the little bit left back to the hotel.

Well, that plan was repeatedly destroyed by a variety of foils. First of all, it was really flippin’ cold. It’s just hard to warm up at all when it’s that cold. Next, there are very few straight sidewalks in Vegas. Every time I’d build up some speed, I’d have to turn a slight corner, go around a tree or a bush or a bench or a fountain or a statue or something, and then turn again to get back onto the straightaway. I got directed onto shopping mall plazas, wooden planks, and actually up onto the 2nd floor of the Venetian somehow and I still don’t know how that happened. They figure out how to get you into their shops and casinos, that’s for sure.

Next, there is no such thing as just crossing the street. To go across the street to the North, you actually have to turn the corner to go East a little ways, up an escalator, then turn North and go across a walkway above the street, then go about a quarter block West to go down another escalator, just to end up directly across the street from where you started out. It is very hard to maintain any sort of reasonable speed when you’re turning 90 degree angles and going up and down on escalators or stairs.

Another botherment was the construction. Vegas in continually under construction, so there were times the sidewalk was intraversable and you had to battle taxis in the street, or where the sidewalk was reduced to a single pedestrian lane and I would end up behind Fred and Ethel who were in considerable less of a hurry than I.

Then there were the homeless people, and other assorted drifters, who, although not terribly abundant, warranted some attention and/or concentration and would slow me down a little as I passed.

In any event, I didn’t come anywhere close to meeting my speed goal. I averaged 5.5 mph for a 7.6 mile run. Where I lost 4 tenths of a mile, I have no idea. I think I must have turned around too soon. Oh well. (Actually, closer examination reveals that the GPS lost me for a part of the run, so I probably did do 8 miles – or more – after all.)

In any event, it was a good work-out. Looks like I had about 30 different spurts during which I was over 6 mph and that about 10 or 11 of them were probably also over 7 mph. That’s pretty good, all things considered. Although I didn’t even come close to hitting my goal, I did have a decent workout and I’m gonna call it good enough.