My Much Anticipated Morning Run

At five o'clock this morning my alarm sounded. SCREW. THAT. I leaned over and hit the snooze button, perhaps a little harder than necessary, but certainly no harder than a snooze button deserves or is used to. Six minutes later the alarm clock again started begging for more punishment. I turned it off. What idiot thought this would be a good idea? But then, just when I thought that I couldn't be any stupider I found my feet on the floor and I was getting dressed to go run. At five o'clock. In the morning. In spite all of YOUR negativity in the comments of yesterday's post and in spite of my ever supportive wife, who said to me last night as I was getting into bed: "You know, it would be funnier if you failed."
"Excuse me?!?"
"Your blog. It would make for a funnier post in the morning if you failed." Awww, thanks honey. I love you too.

In a state of semi-sleep, I pulled my shorts on, laced up my shoes, and went to go check on the coffee. I had pre-programmed our coffee machine last night so that it would be ready for me this morning. Great thinking right? Except for one little oversight. Some idiot forgot to put the coffee grounds in it. Can I interest you in a nice hot pot of water? No? How about a new coffee machine to replace the one I just threw across the kitchen? This is not looking promising.

As I am about to head out, I observe that my shorts are on inside out. Nice work genius. I guess that's what happens when you dress yourself in a sleepy stupor. I remedy the problem and start out for my run. The first thing I notice is that the picture I posted yesterday of the morning runner is full of crap! It's still pitch black out. There's no beautiful sunrise like the one in the picture. Even the sun is not stupid enough to be up at this abominable hour. Undeterred, I continue with my run. It was actually a pretty good run, all things considered. I ran 4 tempo miles (9:00 goal pace) with a warm up mile and a cool down mile. I don't imagine that you're particularly interested in the splits, but you're getting them anyway because I'm a little cranky.

Mile 1 - 9:45 (warm up)
Mile 2 - 9:00
Mile 3 - 8:30
Mile 4 - 8:44
Mile 5 - 8:25
Mile 6 - 9:47 (cool down)

So the actual running part was good. The getting up early, not so much. I've already had two large cups of coffee here at work and I'm still as tired as a Lindsay Lohan excuse. Another good thing about the run this morning was that there was no one else on the trail, and that made me feel like I was a hardcore runner. The bad part was that there was no else on the trail to see me being a hardcore runner. You will all just have to take my word for it. I was hardcore this morning.

The jury is still out on whether running in the mornings is good or not. It's supposed to get up to 97 degrees today so I guess it's a plus that I got my run in early. We'll see how tired I feel for the rest of the day. The real payoff will come tonight when I get home from work and don't have to run. I'm already looking forward to getting my couch potato on. Oh, and the sun did eventually rise. I took a couple of pictures (below) of the sunrise as proof and because I don't know if and when I'll ever see another one. Sunrises are really, really spectacular! Who knew?

Click pictures to enlarge.