Hills ... why must you be so mean?

Tuesday - 3 miles

• 3.79 miles, 45' 03 minutes, 11' 52" min/mile average pace, 166 BPM average heart rate

It is officially the first day of summer! Just to be clear though, I think that the high temperature yesterday was actually higher than it was today. It has felt like summer since the beginning of April. That is living in Florida for you. I actually did try to wake up early enough to go for my run but once again it didn't happen. Normally, I would blame it on having to go to IKEA last night with my family but it really isn't their fault. I can really only blame myself for not going to sleep early enough. Oh well, I still got my run in after work.

For whatever reason, my workout tonight was not as easy as it has been the last couple of weeks. I started my workout in the usual way, a 5 minute walk at a 3.0 mph pace and a 0% incline. I didn't feel too bad after the walking portion of my warm up. I bumped the pace up to 3.5 mph for the next 5 minutes. I also set the treadmill to the randomized hill workout. Today, the hill workout varied from 0% to 4%. When I started the running portion of my workout, my body began protesting and I started to feel sluggish. I am not quite sure what my body was upset with but running felt really labored tonight. I think I ended doing full body scans twice as much as a usually do just trying to figure out if my running stride was causing it. My diet and hydration have not been issues in a few weeks so I don't think that either one of those caused it. Regardless of how I felt, I still wanted to have to the best possible run so I decided to increase my pace to 4.0 mph. I was able to maintain the pace for 40 minutes. I followed the run with a 10 minute walking cool down. Even though I felt like it was literally an uphill battle to maintain the run, I think it ended up being a really good workout. There were several times when I actually thought about walking but didn't. I finished my workout strong and ended up with a fairly decent average pace.