After the storm came through yesterday, it changed the weather completely. This morning I woke up to 54*F, very little humidity and some pretty good breezes. By the time I ran it had warmed up to 61*F, but the breeze had picked up a bit too. In other words it was a great morning for running.

I did the ChiPose pre-run stuff and then decided that I would do a little longer run than I have been doing recently down to Notta Road. So I didn’t do the 0.5 mile Pose Run, instead I focused on doing Pose Lesson 4 down to the lower gate and did okay, but running on the dirt road and down the hill made things a little less Pose and more just get there. Once I got to the lower gate I didn’t focus on how I was running and just ran, although I continued to keep my posture and shorter strides.

The run wasn’t too bad and the right glute stayed pretty calm all the way through. I did slow down quite a bit the last two miles, but I will get the conditioning back soon enough. Today was all about getting in a little longer run and feeling like I could run further when I got done. I accomplished both of those goals. Although I have to admit the cooler weather did help too.

However, the big difference was that I wore my new Timex Ironman watch for the first time. It does cause me to have a different mindset, I found myself thinking whenever I would get to a point where I would normally speed up or more likely slow down that it didn’t matter because the only thing that counted was the final distance and time.

Yes, I did record the mile splits with the Timex and they showed exactly what I thought they would – me going slower each mile, which was okay. The biggest difference was I wasn’t tempted to look at my watch to see current pace or any of the other metrics that used to be available to me during a run with my other GPS watches. I knew they were not going to be there and just focused more on the run.

Which is really what I need to do more than paying attention to what my watch is/can tell me. I believe it is called running by feel (heavy sarcasm – yes, I know what it is), something that I used to be able to do pretty well and got away from it when I started wearing the GPS watches as my daily wear and used on most runs.

One of the other things that I did differently is put the phone on airplane mode while I was running. There were no distractions from it which was nice and I didn’t have to worry about whether the watch and phone synced after I got done. I guess I didn’t realize all the little distractions that having a watch connected to the phone did have.

A nice, quiet and relaxing run where I focused on the run and didn’t try to outrun the imaginary graph that didn’t get uploaded to Strava. Although I did some golf ball massage on the foot when I got done, but ran out of time to eat lunch with Mary and didn’t get in my foam rolling today. Tonight I can tell the difference and will make a point of doing it tomorrow.