One little word captured

CHALLENGE...

On Saturday Chelsea and I had a training scheduled with Milt, we decided to get a run in before the training as I am trying to run 4 times in the week and I had only run twice, not even hitting my goal. At 8 am I began running and just before 9am (our training time) I ran 5 miles.  We then started our training with Milt, which is always awesome because not only does he teach us new things, he challenges us to go further than we thought we could go.

Flash forward to Saturday night as I head to bed earlier than usual not feeling quite myself, am I just drained or am I coming down with something. I awoke in the middle of the night with a horrible sore throat, and if that wasn't enough I could barely move my sore body from the workout earlier in the day!

When I finally got up on Sunday morning, I made my morning coffee, tho it does'nt fare as well with a sore throat and started debating the whole run that I had planned for this morning. This is where my word CHALLENGE for 2011 comes in.  Of any days to run, this day is going to be a challenge but I need to at least try, right?

So I set my mind to a 3 mile run...

after taking Zach to work I head over to Milts, to my trusty treadmill and decide that if I'm only doing a 3 mile run, I should make it a hill run.  So I program the treadmill to hill for 30 minutes.  I kept the pace slower with the incline getting up to 5.0 at some points it was perfect. A funny thing happened after that 30 minutes?  I felt great, I felt I could run for miles so I thought well why not, so I ran another mile and then another mile all the while raising the pace to a faster speed.  

I finished out my run at 6 miles.  Going from not wanting to run to 6 miles, that feels good! That's a challenge!  Then again maybe it was the muscle milk?

As it turned out the running was good for my mind, body and soul!  As I ran my mind wandered from each song that blared out on my ipod. It brought up a feeling, emotion or memory.  From thoughts from the current book I'm reading by Brene Brown The gifts of imperfection where she speaks about fitting in and belonging

and then this song came on my ipod and it almost brought me to tears while running, thinking of my dad, my brother, my son... thinking of myself 

so that is how challenging and rewarding running can be! Oh and yes, I still do have a sore throat...

Check out more examples of One little word captured on Jills blog