Take Two

I reached four miles for the second time this year!!  I wish Brinkley could have been on the treadmill next to me.  He's mad at me.  He's giving me the evil eye for running without him.  I tried to convince him that it's too cold for girl and beast to be outside running.  He doesn't believe me.

I don't like the little gym in our condo complex.  It's cold, small, and dingy.  Running on the treadmill seems to take forever to reach a mile.  And for the life of me I can't figure out how to get the closed captioning to work on the darn television.

So I decided I would hit up the gym at work to tackle my four miles.  It has really nice equipment and an entire wall of windows to look out while running.  And it had the added bonus of the closed-captioning already set when I turned on the television!!

I was a little nervous about running four miles.  First, it's FOUR miles.  I haven't been terribly consistent the last few months.  And I'd only reached four miles one other time this year and that was months ago.  Second, it's the treadmill.  Treadmills and I don't usually get along.  I always feel like I'm going slow and going nowhere.  I hate looking down every one-hundredth of a mile and cursing the machine.  And I'm a klutz.  I always seem to get tangled up in my headphone cord.  One of these day I'm going to fly off of the machine from tripping.

 The run wasn't so bad.  After I started running and getting warm, I told myself to run to two miles and I would take a short break to take off my long sleeve shirt, turn on the fan, and drink some water.  I made it two miles and hit pause.  And then stop as I was climbing off!  (See, I told you I was a klutz)  I was bummed - I wanted to take a picture of my four mile stats at the end.

I turned on the fan, took my shirt off, and gulped.  I had to reset the treadmill back to my speed, which sounds simple but it asks you about twenty questions before the belt starts moving.  Weight?  Height?  Time?  Favorite Sandwich?  Huh?  Once I started running again I realized the fan was really annoying. It was about 4' round and position directly in front of my treadmill.  I felt like I was running uphill in hurricane winds.  Lesson learned.

I ran the next two miles watching/reading Ari and Gibbs face off on NCIS.  I can't even remember any of the songs that played on my iPod.  My thoughts were random enough and NCIS was distracting enough to keep from glancing at the treadmill too often.

I survived 4.2 miles!! My time was around 50 minutes, which is incredibly slow.  But long runs are supposed to be long, slow runs anyway so I'm not going to beat myself up over it.  I did it!  Another step (or four miles worth of steps) in the right direction!!

I did it!!

And "Christmas Shoes" just came on the radio.  AAAHH!! Make it stop!! Perfect time to take Brinkley Miles outside!!