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September 26, 2005
Being Selfish
I admit it. I can be a very selfish runner. This is especially true when it comes to doing workouts. Tonight, for example, I didn't really care what the rest of the group was going to do-I knew what I was supposed to do, but I didn't care what they did. They could do what was on the schedule or whatever they wanted to do, it didn't affect me, so I didn't really care. There will be more venting about my selfishness a bit later, when it is appropriate for the running part.
Tonight's workout was supposed to be a tempo run, but J called me right before I was leaving to tell me that he didn't want me to do the tempo-he thought it was too close to the half-marathon to be tempoing again. He wanted me to do a full load of the 600s, and to not be too concerned with what the pace was on them. There weren't many people at the track and they all decided that they didn't feel like doing the tempo run, so they were going to stay on the track as well. OK, that's fine with me. One of these people is someone who I have written about before, I really try to like most people, and he is an OK person, BUT I can't stand running with him. He seems to love running with me. Isn't it always that way? I like to think of him as a "user"-he uses whoever he is running with, but doesn't help at all (more later).
I must mention that it was really windy on the backstretch. It was pretty obvious that a storm was coming, but the question was if we would be able to get done before the rain started. It was dark and windy and you could just feel the rain trying to break through. We started our 600s and my buddy sat right behind me. I was going through the 600 around 2:15s, so I was pretty much where I wanted to be. After about five of these, I was feeling pretty beat up by fighting the wind, so I asked him to do me a favor and block the wind on the next two because I was having a really hard time breaking it for him. See, he was using me to break the wind, even though I am the smaller one. I guess this is where I get selfish; a lot of the men I run with will take turns taking the lead with me, especially when the conditions are so awful. Well, instead of keeping the pace around 90 for the quarter, he took off and did about an 80 second quarter which I could not do. It did no good for me, I was still alone fighting the wind. The last I checked, what I said does not mean "take off and run as fast as you want". Whatever. I got all ten in and didn't care too much about pace.
It did start to rain on the warm-down. I'm pretty sure that it is going to rain for most of the night now. The radar on the weather showed a huge green area coming this way. The rain won't hurt at all, it hasn't rained much in the past month and a half or more. We didn't really notice that it hadn't been raining because we were so absorbed in the fact that it was so darned hot. Speaking of that, we have had something like forty straight days with a high over 80, but there is supposed to be nice, fall like weather this week. Yay!!
Posted by Blondie at September 26, 2005 07:50 PM