Yeah I know, but I got caught up reading a really good running book last night and didn’t bother writing about my run yesterday. Not that anyone really would miss it if I didn’t write about it other than me at the end of the month. When I go back and re-read the posts to see if there are any glaring patterns emerging or if I am overthinking my running too much.

The roads were clear, which made the running a lot better for avoiding injury, but that 12*F, then adding in the windchills didn’t make the run overly enjoyable. It was supposed to be an easy run at a comfortable effort level.

Which is what I accomplished for four of the five miles. Mile three to four was a miserable suck-fest. It started coming back out of Pepin. Sometimes in the cold weather, I have a harder time breathing nowadays and while the hill isn’t bad yet down there, the wind was in my face and I was struggling already.

Then coming up Philbrick Hill, breathing just seemed to get harder and harder. Yeah, I slowed to a walk for most of the hill. Which was probably just as well. The effort level was just too high to keep going at that pace and call it an easy day.

Sometimes I and most other runners have to forget their ego and run easy days easy and if that means walking on a hill every so often to keep things easy, that is what needs to be done. Yeah, checking that ego is not an easy thing, but since I couldn’t seem to get a good breathing rhythm going up Philbrick, it was the correct choice.

After getting to the top of Philbrick Hill, I decided that I had had enough of running uphill (even the small ones) and kept running straight towards the Big Pine down-back to finish up the 5.0 miles. Some days the environmental conditions make it so that you do things a little differently than usual and when the windchills bring the temps down to single-digits, I know to take things a little easier.

I know that others are having an even worse time with the temps outside right now, but when they get below 10*F, I become a little paranoid about how the cold is now affecting how I breath in it. One of those wonderful things that never used to bother me, but now seems to all too often.

Otherwise, I will take the good four miles I ran today and smile at the one that was a bit of character building. 😜