My first thought was all sciencey in nature: "Crap. It's foggy. That means the relative humidity is near 100%." (See how I snuck in both biology (crap) and meteorology (relative humidity) in there?)
My second thought was not sciencey at all: "Crap. This also means I'm going to get drenched."
And drenched I was. Even my eyelashes were clogging up with precipitation. But I wasn't going to let that distract me from finishing my hated tempo run. I was going to run all 6 miles at my target pace if it killed me.
Well, it didn't kill me, but I did manage those 6 miles at an average pace of 8:51. I kept reminding myself how glad I would be in mile 22 of my marathon that I stuck it out and did all these tempos. Reminding myself of this kept my mind off the fact that I am absolutely terrified of getting hit by a car while running in the dark. Add some thick soupy fog like there was this morning and I have full-blown panic attacks at the mere glimmer of oncoming headlights. I'm all like "Do they see me? They don't see me. Do they see my blinking lights and reflective vest? Maybe? Probably not." whenever I see a car, and then I scamper far into the ditches on the side of the road when they pass me. I think I'm going to break my ankle in the ditch before a car hits me.
The other thing I kept reminding myself about was how drenched I was becoming. At one point I looked down and thought I had peed myself without my knowledge. But no--it was just all sorts of sweat forming a nice spot on the front of my awesome purple running skirt:
In fact, I was a true running vision in purple this morning:
Now if only I could blog smells. You'd really get a sense of how hard I worked to run all 6 miles of that tempo run. Anyhoo, despite the darkness and the fog, it was a pretty good run. Mentally it was a huge victory for me; I think I am developing a thick mental skin (finally). Let's hope it stays thickened up for the 22-mile run on tap for Saturday morning.
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