Night runner

I've never in my life enjoyed running at night so this whole transition to being an evening runner has taken some time to get used to. Last night, for example, I finished work at around 8 p.m. and decided that I wanted to chat with my wonderful wife, who I really haven't seen in about two weeks, so by the time I was ready to go for my run it was 9 p.m. Among the many benefits of summer -- aside from the sun -- is it's light for much longer, so at least I was not running in a blanket of darkness.

My schedule had me down for a 50-minute run last night and notwithstanding my speed and interval training, I haven't really followed my sked for two weeks because of work constraints. I figured I'd head out for 10K and evaluate how I felt and how dark it was to decide whether I was going to meet my target. I must say the run started really slow, I've been experiencing a lot of muscle fatigue lately so my first split was around 4:30. I went out the back of my subdivision and then ran along the Lincoln Road, turning around at the Irving. The advantage to this route is that I'm actually adding some small hills, which I painfully discovered last weekend that I need more practice on if I want to stop crashing in races. Once I hit 10K, which was right in front of my house (man I love my Garmin), I decided that I'd add one more kilometre. I wouldn't hit 50 minutes but I'd be close enough. In the end, I wrapped up the 11K in 47:22 with an average split of 4:18. I brought the final two splits in 4:15 and 3:58.