Treadmill Tempo Run Fail

I woke up dreading my run today.  Mainly it was because I was up late last night blogging all sorts of blogariffic things on all my blogs, and the late was made later by the fact that I teach a grad class on Wednesday nights.

I need to learn to make better blogging choices.

Anyway, I woke up very tired and very cold.  The wind was howling, the temperature was in the teens, and there was no way I could run a tempo run in sub-zero wind chills.  Or, at least that's what the hubbs mumbled to me when my alarm went off at 4 AM.  It's very cold here in Illinois right now, in case you didn't know:

Even my puppies are feeling the cold, and they're built for it (partly genetics, partly too much blubber):

This morning I had to gather up all my courage--even the stray bits under the bed and in the back corner of the linen closet--to go downstairs and do a 4 mile tempo on the treadmill.

You probably already know I can barely handle running 1000m repeats on the thing, so you can imagine the state I was in when I started running 4 miles at my tempo speed.  Outside, I can run a 4-mile tempo without much thought. The treadmill, however, is a much different and completely sad, pathetic story:

First 800m: "This isn't so bad.  At least I have some good TV on the trusty old ID channel."
Next 800m: "This is starting to suck."
Next 800m: "Maybe I should kick the speed down a notch.  If I were a total wimp."
Next 800m: "ZOMG I'LL NEVER MAKE IT I SUCK I WILL TOTALLY FAIL AT THIS MARATHON."

In case you were counting, I barely made it to the half-way point of this tempo.  After that, I had to break it up into 800 m repeats just to get through the workout.  What's extremely sad is that the last part is no exaggeration; I was mentally cracking by the second mile.  I really need to mentally toughen the you-know-what-bad-word-to-which-I-am-referring up.  So, to punish myself, I shall be doing more tempos on the treadmill until my inner whiny baby learns to put a cork in it.  It's kind of like self-flagellation, only with a treadmill.  I think.