If at first you don't succeed....

I will have to admit, after yesterday, the doubts crept in. I really doubted that I could do this. For some people 1 mile is a daunting amount. That mental wall you can't get past and always end up bailing. I had begun to worry that 3.5 miles was my personal wall.

I can be a bit dramatic. Notice, it took one day of not meeting my goal after a whole week of missing workouts and eating less than stellar for this doubt to creep in. But today is a new day. I awoke with the sheer will to try again. Then I started running and felt awful! The doubts told me to bail at the end of my road (less than 1/10th a mile) and try another day. The logic in my head commanded me to keep going because if I didn't try, then I'd push it off til tomorrow, then the next day and the mental wall of 3.5 miles would only grow taller. Over the course of the run the voices saying stop kept screaming, but the voices saying keep going began to grow louder.

A 4 mile course had been mapped out, but the aforementioned doubts made me bail on that path and create a new one. Somehow, by sheer stubbornness, I managed to plow through it! I stopped at 50 min, 31 sec hoping that I had managed to make 4.0 miles. Well I got close: 3.95 miles to be exact! So take that 3.5 mile wall. Next wall: actually hitting 4.0 miles and moving on to 4.5 miles!

I've spent all this time building up 4.0 miles to be this insane distance that it's a pretty big wall to climb. Then again, last year, 3.0 miles was near impossible to fathom and we all see how that turned out. So here's to getting back on the proverbial horse and sticking to those "other" workouts (strength, stretching and cross training). They really do help whether or not I feel they do whilst I'm doing them...