My Longest Run Ever!

Yesterday, I went golfing with a lot of my husband's family in Monterey.  I really have started to dislike golf, but they needed me to fill out the second foursome.  The course was pretty and interesting, and fortunately it didn't rain and wasn't too too cold.  I planned ahead with a lot of layers and was OK.  No rain was key.

Today, I went to the gym Fitness Evolution in Monterey to get a day pass to use the treadmill.  The next run on my training schedule was for race-pace intervals.  I had to do 10 x 1 mi at 6.3 mph (9:30 min/mi), alternating with 10 x 5 min at 5.0 mph (12:00 min/mi).  Following those paces and times, the distance comes to 14.16 mi, which is the farthest I've ever run at once!  One time previously, I ran 14 mi.  The time for this added up to 2:25:00.

This was a hard run for a number of reasons.  First, doing the race-pace intervals is hard.  The first few were OK, especially since I was watching a movie, but they definitely get hard.  However, the run was made much harder than it really had to be because of the stupidity of the treadmill I was using.  It would automatically pause (i.e., stop) if no one was running on it for 30 seconds.  I suppose that is a good safety feature, but it's annoying for taking breaks on the side rails.  Then, it also defaults to only allowing 20-min runs, which is annoying when I was going to be running almost 2.5 hours.  Later on, I figured out that I could increase this time to 60 min, but then the pausing would sometimes reset that.  Overall, that was very frustrating.

To make it even worse, I was having trouble watching the movie on my Kindle.  I was naturally sweating a ton and spraying sweat all over, including on my Kindle.  The sweat droplets sometimes acted like touches on the Kindle.  Mostly it liked to jump my movie to different parts of the movie, and then I had to fiddle with it to get back to where I was.  Often, that caused me to stop running for more than 30 sec, so the stupid treadmill paused, and I had to reset that.

In total, the run was a hard and frustrating experience.  Because of the treadmill and Kindle issues, I know that I ran a lot less than I was supposed to, although I tried to lose the most time during the 5-min rest portions.