Tired

After this morning, I could no longer describe myself as a runner. My 1.5 hour tempo run quickly turned into a slog after my warm-up miles. It took everything I had to get to the road and begin the run. On a 1 to 10 scale, I would have rated my energy level as a solid 2. Somehow, I managed to clock my usual 8 minute miles for my warm-up, but my breathing was very labored and my heart rate was holding steady around 135 bpm, which I consider unusually low when you consider it was 78 degrees/85% humidity. I picked up the pace to tempo and felt like I was sucking air through a straw. Strangely, my heart rate didn't respond too well. Seemed like a bastardized version of the Frank-Starling Stall. I think my body was trying to tell me it wanted to rest. I couldn't even crack 145 bpm with an initial sub 7 minute pace. Normally, I'm running in the 150's at this point and take it up to around 175 for the second half of the run. So, what did I do? I walked and did a good portion of that during the remainder of the "run", and sprinkled a few spurts of running here and there. At the end, I managed to run a sub 6 for the last mile, but the old heart was fighting me tooth and nail and never cracked 160. No, I'm not in good enough shape to run that effort at that heart rate. I tend to think my body was wanting to just rest. I'm not sick, just tired. And, I felt the same way yesterday morning when I bagged my gym workout.

Thankfully, I have some good ideas on how to correct my lethargy. And, possibly, my 60k training run this past weekend, although I didn't push that much, may have taken more out of me than I originally thought. Time to get over this morning's effort and do my best to prepare for the next run. It only takes another good run to forget the bad ones.