Motivation

I've been seriously slacking as of late, and giving myself lots of excuses for why.  Some are valid, some are not, but regardless they are not helping me move forward with my fitness goals.   It is easy for me to come up with reasons to ride.  The biggest problem I have with riding is choosing which bike to ride and, trust me, sometimes that is awfully hard, especially when I only have so much car space to dedicate to bikes.   Running, on the other hand, is something I want to be better at, but am currently really bad at.   This creates a lot of negative feelings towards the idea of going out for a run and has resulted in something like two weeks with no runs.   Obviously, if I want to do a tri without embarrassing myself, this needs to change.

As I was contemplating this rather distasteful fact, I kept returning to the vague goal I had set for myself earlier in the year.   While I knew I was not going to be in shape for a tri this year, I had kinda sorta though that I would do a 5k at some point.   Well, vague goals are about as good as no goals from a motivation standpoint, so I decided to make this one a little more concrete.   So, I pulled up a list of races in Southern Minnesota and picked on that looked fun -- the Big Woods Run.  This race is perfect for me:  it's not until October, so I have time to train; it is a trail run, which I enjoy; and it's close to home.   So,  I've bet $33 bucks on myself that I can get my butt into gear and be in shape to run a 5k in October without shame.   Here goes!

Riding the wave of this new motivation, I did both a run and a ride today.   The run was not so spectacular on paper (or screen, if you will), but I was pretty excited because it is the 3rd day of week 4 of C25K and I was a little worried I would have lost ground enough that I couldn't do it.  No problem!  If anything, it was easier than the last run I did, though I will say it being something like 20 degrees cooler probably didn't hurt.   The ride was a mountain bike ride around the parks of Decorah.  Mostly, this ride is notable for two things: 1) I very nearly fell down a cliff after hitting a rock wrong 2) I got passed by a runner - twice.  Ouch.

Workout:  
The run:  2.1 miles / 13 min/mile pace (this is how long it took me to run a mile in high school, so woot! :P )
The ride: 5 miles / 7.6 mph avg (yeah, that was totally skewed by the 18 mph down Quarry Hill Road)