14.7 is the new 12

Last week was a big suck fest. Work and school were getting on my last nerves and besides enduring each never ending workday, I fit in three separate doctor’s appointments (no I’m not pregnant or dying), two runs, two Crossfit workouts, and a meeting with my school group. When I got into work on Tuesday, things were already at Suck Level 8, so I told my cube mate (we’ll call him “Cal”) that I didn’t know if I could make it through the week. He said, “well, the good news is that you made it to Wednesday.”

Did I? Did I make it to Wednesday?

I was annoyed that his pep talk made me feel worse and he was annoyed that it wasn’t actually Wednesday. Then on Thursday afternoon, “Cal” went to fill in his timesheet for the day to find out he already filled out Thursday on Wednesday. So we were both a hot mess all week but at least we were a hot mess together.

That brings me to Saturday. I wasn’t looking forward to a 5:00am wake up after the week I had, but I do like running with Brad (my running husband) so we set out to do 12 miles. Somewhere around mile nine, we realized that we miscalculated our distance and we’re actually on track to run 14.5. It dawned on Brad that he would be home later than usual and the fear of his wife’s wrath propelled him from a 11:30 pace to a 9:30. I had a hard time keeping up. I have never seen motivation quite like it. When we had half a mile to go he asked, “do you want to simulate a race finish?”

A race finish on a training run? I didn’t even want the simulate the 9:30 pace he was making me run for the last four miles. We ended up with 14.7 miles at the end and that was after taking a slight shortcut.

After our runs, we usually chat for a few minutes but he was basically waving out the window while driving off by the time I looked up from my Garmin to say goodbye. It was pretty funny to see how panicked he was but then also sad because I would probably be dead for several hours before hubs noticed I wasn’t home.

And that is the story of how I ran negative splits on a training run.