Another night of 4.5 hours sleep to get up early enough to beat the heat, or the illusion of beating it – in these temps, taming it is the best you can do. Like every night before a challenging run, I get a little excited of what the morning will bring and today with 11 miles and a 6 mile tempo thrown in the middle, was no exception.

I left the house at a really easy 10:18 which is funny in itself, since last year when I finally got into the 9s, I wouldn’t dare do 10 anything from that point on. Seriously, it wasn’t till this training cycle, when I’m trying to follow the correct way to T, that I’m finally going slower so I can go faster and by golly, the shit’s working!

I would have liked to have to started the tempo at 2 miles in, but because there are few fountains in the park and I didn’t want to interrupt the tempo portion if I could, I started at mile 3 so I could get my last sip at the fountain before the doing the deed. As usual, with these long Pfitz tempos, when I’m finishing that last warmup mile, I ask myself how in hell am I going to be able to do this, it’s almost 2 minutes faster that what I’m doing now and I’m not walking. Waaaahhhh.

Internal tantrums aside, I kicked it! Yuh-huh! My tempo avg was 8:02, splits were 8:05, 8:03, 8:02, 7:57, 8:04, 8:05. On an 80 degree morning with a thimble of sleep…I’ll take it!

One thing that helped is, you know I’d been leaving my music turned off recently? Last night I made a playlist especially for today’s run. I’ve been downloading a lot of fun stuff anyway, so I put 4 of the slower songs at the top, then a transition song, then the good stuff took me through the tempo. Favorite songs from this round are Idlewild’s “You Held The World In Your Arms” (not a great video, but the song is infuckingcredible) and Carolina Liar’s “Show Me What I’m Looking For”
(talk about an anthem! who wouldn’t want to run to those chimes, that choir…ah!).

Other than that, most of you probably know about the drama thread at RW since that’s where the bulk of you guys come from anyway and that thing sent over a ton of people yesterday. Anyway, just an amusing note about it all, a do-gooder poster let me know that he reported the thread yesterday to the admins because he thought the OP was a little unstable. I understood, but wanted the truth to be out, so didn’t really want the thread removed.

As it happens, the only fallout from the admins was a PM for me today, admonishing me for cussing in a thread with one of my oh-so-clever workarounds (in this case “fuc-king”, and if you see it in context, it’s completely justified). Actually I was pretty proud of that one (looks better than schit which I write for shit), but that’s cool. I understand their point. Happily, I have no such rules on this blog, so I want to say this (and I mean it in only the nicest possible way)…have a fucking fabulous Friday, each and every one of you. Later, babies.

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