The Out and Back

In the past, I was never crazy about the out and back. Kind of boring seeing the exact same scenery twice in a row in a relatively short amount of time. But lately, I've been really liking the out and back. I simply think to myself, "All I have to do is go __ miles, and then I just turn around and go home." For weekday training runs, this is really nice, because 4 miles out is (usually) the farthest I go. Then, as I said, I simply turn around and run back to my car--deosn't even seem like 8 miles. I wouldn't mind trying an out and back marathon. I know that the 13.1 miles back would not even compare to the 4 or so return miles I am currently running during my weekday training, but I would be interested to see the psychological difference between an out and back and a loop.

This morning, I headed out to run the same path and distance I ran Monday morning in order to determine my distance Monday morning (since my Garmin died less than a half mile in on Monday). My legs felt tired right off the bat, so I knew it was going to be especially important for me to run today. A couple of miles in, I started loosening up and feeling a little better. Tool's "Vicarious" at about mile 3 helped to move me along for a good 7 or 8 minutes as I was transitioning into feeling better.

I forced myself to refrain from checking my Garmin until I hit the turnaround point. Once I hit the spot, I looked down and saw that I had hit 4.66 miles. I was pretty happy about that, as all I was really wanting to do was run 8 miles, both Monday and today, and it looked like I would be exceeding (and had exceeded) 9 miles both days. This brought me to 70 miles for the month so far (after I completed today's run), which is ten miles beyond my August monthly total (because of that little injury I had in August).

9-16-09
Distance: 9.3
Time: 1:18:17
Avg. Mile Pace: 8:25