Beautiful Day... For Hill Repeats??

I was not feeling it this morning. Sam hadn't slept well, I hadn't slept well, my stomach wasn't feel great... blah blah blah. Ryan asked me where I was headed before I went out the door, knowing full well that I had hill repeats on the schedule for this morning. I wasn't happy about it, but I knew I should do them anyway, so I grudgingly said "Mt. A." I debated with myself as I ran over. I decided to do 6 repeats, thinking each loop would be around a 1/2 mile, meaning that with the run over and the run back, it would work out to around 5 miles, which is what I wanted for the day. In the end, the loop, or at least the back loop (I went up the paved hill each time, but alternated coming down the sand hill in the front and going down through the woods in the back), was only around a 1/3 a mile, so the math didn't quite match up. At one point, I had talked myself into only doing 5 loops, but in the end, I managed to do 7. I took the long way back home to get in the rest of the mileage, and even saw a deer in the woods back behind the high school!

While I'm calling this a workout, I didn't "race" the hills, I just tried to move up them steadily. Sadly, even "steadily" was just plain S-L-O-W. Damn. I hate feeling slow. When I got back, Ryan took one look at me and said, "So, not adding that to your regular running repertoire, huh?" To which I said, "Well, I didn't say that, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be happy about running it again." The reality is, I know this should help my running and will make my legs a bit stronger, so I am going to go out and do it again. Hopefully it will be easier next time. And maybe I'll even shoot for more repeats next time :-)