Lost in the Woods

It was awfully windy Thursday, which was pretty much the perfect excuse to do something other than ride bike.   Given that I had pretty new shoes just itching to be worn in the great outdoors, my choice was clear.   I had decided I wanted to go running in Kaplan's Woods, which is halfway across town for me.  I keep thinking that I should really bike to Kaplan's, but for a myriad of reasons (most of which boiling down to I'm lazy), I drove instead.   Once I got there, I dialed up the must dreaded W5D3 of C25K and headed down the path.

C25K works like this: 5 minute warm up, workout, 5 minute cool down.   Well, after I had been walking for what seemed like an awfully long time, I took a look at my phone.  Sure enough, I had forgotten to turn up the ringer, so I had missed the start of the run.   Rather than cut the run short, I decided I would restart the day, and just run during the warm-up section this time, and finish five minutes early.   Plan established, I took off.

I had never really been in Kaplan's before, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect.   It amounts to a bunch of very similar looking trails that loop around on each other.   I admit, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to where I was, but I was fairly certain I had gone by a particular bridge a couple of times.   I checked the time at 15 minutes into the workout.   After that, feeling pretty sure I was somewhere near my known landmarks, I promised myself I wouldn't look again until I was somewhere I recognized.   Well, I was wrong.  Where I thought I had been doing small loops, I had actually been doing on BIG loop around the outer edge of the trail.   End result was the same, but it took a bit longer than I would have thought to get to a landmark.  

All in all, it was a good run.  Courtesy of being a little lost, I actually ran for nearly 25 minutes, instead of the prescribed 20.   I didn't move super fast, but I did keep moving, even up and down some pretty significant hills.   The only real negative is that I had a stitch in my side pretty much the entire run.  I have a very hard time concentrating on breathing out on the left foot strike and while I've read that stretching might help, I fail to understand how I can stretch the ligaments holding my liver in place.   The best part though, is that 25 minutes is the longest I have run at one time, ever.  

Workout:  2.3 miles / 13.4 pace