On Mondays, I try to run two miles, running for as long as I can at my goal pace (7:00 mi).

About half a mile into my run, I realized it wasn’t going to be a good one. I was wheezing; telling myself I would walk after the first mile; overheating in the 40 degree weather. I managed to avoid walking, but I took the second mile fairly slowly.

I had done a quarter mile warmup with no problems, but poor performance on one of these morning runs isn’t uncommon for me. In general, I don’t seem to be able to run well in the morning. I’m too hungry and tired to drag my heavy legs forward, and grogginess turns into the usual feeling of drowning at relatively low speeds. I’ve managed to counteract this somewhat, at times, by eating lots of pizza the night before; in this case, I ran 5 miles last night, so I did almost the opposite of what I needed to do.

Moving my runs to later in the day probably isn’t an option. It would just make it too easy for me to skip workouts. Currently, I have a decent rule for skipping workouts (aside from injury concerns): if I wake up on time, I work out.

Even though my speed wasn’t great, I was definitely hitting my target HR (160-170) for most of the run, so I should have gotten a decent cardio exercise.

Overall stats are hard to say. Right after the run, my watch reported that I had done a 9:27 mile average, with exactly 2 miles. Strava puts me at 8:33 miles, with 1.9 miles run. I wonder if the difference is that Strava only counts “moving time” — so if I stop at a light (which happened several times on this run) it doesn’t count.

I do think it’s probably fair to say that I did the first mile in a bit less than 8:30.

Amusingly, according to Strava I set two PRs: for my 400m and for a segment of the route called the “Foot Bridge to Western Avenue Sprint.” Indeed, on that segment I improved my ranking from around 1700/1968 to 361/1968!  (I imagine this is because most people don’t sprint that particular segment, but rather run it as part of their usual routes.)

Run is on Strava.