Wasn’t it just Week 6?

Monday: rest
Tuesday: 5.8 mi, paved trail (MRT, 6 x 0.5 mi)
Wednesday: 2.8 mi, trail (Murphy-Hanrehan)
Thursday: 6 mi, paved trail (Big Rivers, 40 @ tempo)
Friday: 4.3 mi, trail (Battle Creek)
Saturday: 14.6 mi, road (warm-up, Run Baby Run 10K, evening run)
Sunday: 5.1 mi, trail (Battle Creek)
Total: 38.6 mi

I hate Monday rest days. They’re the worst! They set the tone for the rest of the week and remove all flexibility. I had my violin lesson and got home later in the day and didn’t have the time to get a run in. It’s a shame, because the weather was PERFECT.

Tuesday I did half mile repeats on the Mississippi River Trail. I still haven’t mastered the proper pace, which probably contributed to the inflated sense of ability I brought to my 10K. It wasn’t exceptionally hot, so I wasn’t entirely miserable, but yuck do I hate these workouts while also loving them and feeling bada$$ once they’re over.

I volunteered for another installment of the Endless Summer Trail Run Series on Wednesday, and got to the park early to run most of the course. The run was awful. I dislike running at Murphy due to the flies — even one or two buzzing around me drives me bonkers. I wasn’t in a great frame of mind and didn’t have a lot of energy, so I couldn’t even muster 3 miles. I spent the rest of the night volunteering. One of the volunteer photographers posted a rather unfortunate picture of me in the photoset for the evening, so that was kind of a downer.

For Thursday’s tempo run, I “cheated” a bit. Well, not really. I started the run heading mostly uphill at one end of the Big Rivers Regional Trail (the Lilydale end), and the peak pace for the tempo run happened to hit just as I was turning around to run back downhill. So it’s not cheating in the sense that I ran the first 20 minutes of the tempo going uphill, but I did hit my peak effort while running downhill. It was tough! But it felt pretty good. I averaged a 10:55 for the whole tempo effort.

Friday’s run was a regular old boring run at Battle Creek (near the dog park). Not much to report. I recapped Saturday morning’s 10K already, but I did top up my mileage with another 7-ish mile run in the evening (with new shoes! I hit 500 miles on my road shoes so I had to spring for a new pair). That run was a bit of a disaster. It was hot during the day, so I didn’t start until 8:30 PM. I ran across the High Bridge and was tooling around St. Paul, planning to cross Shepard Road near the Science Museum. There was a train going through so I did a short loop through Upper Landing Park and then planned to wait out the train, which was almost through. But with the end of the train in sight, it stopped. And didn’t move. And I was stuck. There are only a couple other ways across Shepard Road along the river, and both were quite a distance away. It was late, probably 9:30 at this point, and I had a choice to either turn around and cross at Randolph (which turned out to be over a mile away) or continue and cross at Jackson (which was about 3/4 mile away). I made the (correct) choice to continue downriver and cross the street and the railroad tracks at Jackson, then come up along Kellogg and cross the Mississippi on the Wabasha St. Bridge. This added a bunch of time and distance to my night, as well as the potential to encounter some sketchy people, which I fortunately did not. It was a giant pain in the butt and a little bit disconcerting. I am lucky to live in a fairly safe city, but I did put myself in a not-so-great situation without a great option for extrication. I also did not have my cell phone with me, which I usually don’t for runs in my neighborhood. Safety moment!

Sunday I did a run in the middle of the day at the Battle Creek ski trails. One day, I will have a nice, pleasant, fast-ish run along those trails (and get some nice pics!), but Sunday was not that day. It was hot and sunny, and I actually ran out of water! I filled my soft flasks with only ice, and while the water was deliciously cold, there wasn’t enough of it. So yes, ice does melt slower in an air solution vs. a water solution (heat transfer, baby!), but I sacrificed volume for temperature. Yuck. Oh, also, it was hard to get water out of the soft flasks when it was still mostly ice – I kept sucking air instead.

I have another 5K coming up this weekend, and I think I’ll take the lessons of this last week and do a LOT of things differently, including a second rest day the day before the race, so I can build up my confidence again.