Battling the Bad Thoughts

Workout:
~Wednesday: Rest - My Birthday!
~Thursday: 4 miles
~Marathon Miles: 16.25

Wednesday was my birthday! I am officially old. Well, I guess not really, but I did celebrate my 3rd 27th birthday. I took the day off from running/working out, mostly because there truly was not any time in the day and I didn't think running on a full stomach of delicious gourmet Thai food and 2 glasses of wine sounded like the greatest idea known to man. I may also have been in a slight diabetic coma, since my office manager made me the greatest German chocolate cake in history. It was a good day.

My post-birthday present today was another 6:30am run with my ortho peeps in the books. Lindsay, Neil, and I are the unofficial ortho running club. I cannot tell you what a great motivator it is to know that someone is counting on you to show up and run. The run today was gorgeous. Bright blue skies, high-50's, and only 2 near-death experiences. Neil was almost run over by some jerk blowing through a stop sign; I nearly collided with a biker who thought jumping off of his bike right in front of me on the sidewalk seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I think if Lindsay had been chased by a dog, we would have had the trifecta. But despite the excitement, we ran 4 miles in about 40 minutes and  I didn't completely want to keel over. Not a bad start to the day.

I do love having people to run with, but I will confess, I get a lot of anxiety about it. Not so much now with these particular friends now that I've run with them a few times. However, in general, I have found I prefer to run by myself mainly because I get so stressed out and worried about my pace slowing down the people I'm running with. I also get into a bad cycle of comparing my abilities to their's and wondering "why can't I run as fast as them?" or "if I can't keep up with 3 miles, how will I ever run 26.2?" And, I have the fear of looking stupid. Yes, this is very bad. There was an article in  Runner's World that discussed the mental aspect of running. There are books written on this subject, but the article was a nice read and gave some good tips on how to combat this. I tried to use some positive mental speak with myself when I felt some of those thoughts creeping in today on our run. I think for me, the mental aspect is going to be the most difficult aspect of training. The article discussed having a mantra or words to say to yourself if you're feeling down. I thought maybe I could say "Beer is at the finish?"  Maybe I'll work on that one :)