The Big 4! Almost…

Note: I’m writing this post at 11:00 pm with only about 5 hours of sleep last night so please forgive the typos and grammatical errors. Actually you don’t have to forgive all of them just enough of them so this post is on par with the rest of my other postings.

On Friday I decided to run 4 miles.  I had never in my life run a contiguous 4 miles, thinking about it now I’d never run 3.6 miles either but 4 is a nice round number and I decided that would be how far I was going to run.   I loaded up my ipod with a list of songs I new were going to pump me up. I opened google maps and mapped out the run I was going to do and set out.  I got home 39 minutes or so later and was stoked. Not only had I just run 4 miles but I had done it under 10 minutes a mile. This was a really big deal for me. I came in the house feeling like a champion.   I couldn’t wait to tell my wife but I couldn’t because at the time she was sleeping,  to pass some time I opened mapmyrun.com to record my victory.

My joy was short lived because when I finished entering my run I was shocked! I had only run 3.75 miles.  I could not understand how this was possible. I had expressly mapped out a 4 mile that I was now being told was only 3.75 miles.  My previous attempts at not waking up my wife were forgotten and in my frustration I got a little too loud.  After a few very frustrating minutes I finally realized my mistake, illustrated below.

The route on the map is what I ran, the dotted black line is part of the original route that I didn’t end up running. Here is why.

Heading east on Cambridge Street towards Harvard the road dips down into a tunnel and I wasn’t sure if there was a sidewalk so I decided to turn south early. With my legs burning the last thing I was thinking was how this was going to affect the total distance of my run. In fact about 3 minutes earlier I was telling myself that I really didn’t need to be running 4 miles today and that if I turned around where I was I would end up with a cool 2.5 miles which was more the sufficient.  Some how though I was able to muscle through those thoughts and finish this run.

Once I had a chance to cool down I have to admit I was really proud of myself because as I said earlier I wanted to turn back really early. There were several points during this run were I considered turning back early and calling it quits but for some reason I didn’t.  I kept telling myself that I’d stop at half way knowing full well that every step I took away from home was another step I would have to take back. For some crazy reason I figured that if I could just get half way I’d quit and be done.  It doesn’t make any sense now but it did then.

When I hit halfway I just kept running. My legs were burning and I was really tired and wanted to be home.  The quickest way to get home was to keep running and not to stop….

Posted by slayton on May 19, 2009

http://quasicontrol.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/the-big-4-almost/