Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The sun and I are apparently on conflicting schedules...

I love running in the daytime. Especially this time of year when it only gets to 68*F outside and it's beautiful. Even mornings when the sun's only been up a few hours. Sunday when I went out around 8am the sun was shining and I got to see a little family of bunnies having brunch by the side of the trail. It was nice.

This morning however my alarm went off at 4:30am. It wasn't just dark out, it was like pitch black. I ate some toast w/jelly and then went back to bed for a while to let it digest before I went out to run. Around 5:45am I finally dragged my butt out of bed, threw on some running clothes and headed out.

If you can believe this, it was STILL pitch black when I got to the trail at 6:00am. I was expecting the sky to be starting to get a little less "pitch" black and more of a gray during my run, but no such luck. So do I like running in the dark? Well...

The first 10 minutes or so I spent being paranoid someone was going to jump out and attack me even though I was on a main road lol. After about 10 minutes I think I was effectively tired enough to not really care if someone jumped out and attacked me and just started enjoying the run. At times it was hard to see where the trail was going but I could always see about 10 feet in front of me so I never fell off of it. It was nice when I could see a light in the distance I was running to but most of the time I just gazed around at the darkness, or random headlights from cars.

After the turnaround when I was now running facing traffic, it was kinda neat to be running into the headlights. Every time one passed it made me feel like I was going faster than I was lol. I didn't realize I was about to finish until like 4 seconds before because I didn't see my "starting landmark" (a certain street sign) until I was about to hit it. Good thing I was kicking it from the last 1/2 mile already.

The only other complaint i had was it was hard to see my garmin and the backlight doesn't just stay on you have to keep turning it on.

Overall, I'd rather run in the sunrise or just plain sun. I'm a sun-lover.

p.s. the run went great. I'm finally able to get back to my normal 9:30 pace and not be in a lot of pain afterward :D

4 comments:

  1. I really am not liking the time change. Like you I was starting to expect day light for some of my runs and it was so nice! I don't mind the dark, but not on trails

    ReplyDelete
  2. I can't run in the morning, I'm a big scared-y cat and refuse to go out the door when it's dark, even in my 'safe' gated neighborhood. So I run after work now that the time has changed. Be careful out there!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sounds like a great run! I'm going to make it my goal to wake up early enough one day this week to take a picture of the sunrise while running. Congrats on getting out there so early!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi! Thanks for stopping by my blog yesterday. I have just recently signed up for the Chicago marathon too! I've heard it's a great race!

    ReplyDelete