When Khaki Cargo pants double as workout pants

Yesterday, being Terry Day and all, was a time for a run… a long run at that! I was hoping to get 12 miles run. With our wintry weather on Monday, I knew that it was going to be cold and since there wasn’t too much melting going on, I was a little afraid that some of the Greenway would be icy.

Despite my planning, I failed to put my sweatpants in my workout bag. So, I was stuck with a dilemma, do I either 1) Run in Shorts, 2) Not Run at all or 3) Run in my Cargo Pants. Since there is very few things that will stop a runner for getting their mileage in, I thought that I would go for the warmest option available… run in Cargo Pants.

The first mile in the cold was fairly brutal. Mainly from the fact that something in my body was not happy. I think it was a combination of being very bundled up and so there was a sudden jump in the heat of my core and that my body was processing some sugar (Gummy Cola Bottles) that I had eaten about an hour previous. So, I felt sick and like I could throw up. I forced myself to make it to the first Mile and then walk 1/4 mile. Shortly after walking, I let out a big belch and felt 1000x better. It was then that I put 2 and 2 together about the condition and how I felt. I decided that I would walk 1/4 of a mile and then run 3/4 of a mile. And it wasn’t that i would do this in a particular order, but that the overall mileage would be broken down that way. For example for mile 3 and 4, I walked the 1st 1/4 mile, then ran 1-1/2 miles, then walked a 1/4 mile. I wasn’t trying to make an interval of it more than I was trying to get my body used to running again. With an abbreviated schedule until Knoxville, I kinda have to stick to my training, because now I have people RELYING on me to run Knoxville. But there was a curious thing about my mileage yesterday and Shirley’s comment from yesterday’s post touched on something that I was mulling over the last couple of miles of my run… and HOW I was going to run 5hr 30 minutes…

Man, 5:30 hours is a LONG time to be on one’s feet running. For someone who usually runs much faster, I think it may actually require some serious time-on-feet training. Are you planning to do a Galloway run-walk interval like I know many slower runners do? That would also certainly add some time to your race

And there’s the rub… I don’t think that I will know who is really going to be part of this pace group until Race Day. So I won’t really know how to run in a lower gear. I use the Galloway (run/walk method) as part of my patent-pending “Marathon Survival Mode”, but even in that case… it’s a sub 5 hour marathon. I have to chuckle at myself because I starting to stress and worry about my race da performance, because this is something brand new to me. It’s always been “Let’s See How Fast I Can Finish This Race” and last year, it was “Can I Survive the Flying Monkey Marathon Just 8 Days After Another Marathon?” And when I have paced other marathon runners (as I did most recently in Rutledge), it has been runners that i have picked up along the way… not runners that I responsible for. And I do feel responsible for these runners, who ever they may be! And I have already started to think about what to do at the finish line, just to add that extra special Terryesque element. I want to be the Pacer with Extra Savoir Faire.

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