Where is the jungle?

Not too often I get nervous before a training run but this was one of those days. It's been over a month since the marathon and all the training has been at easy or as-I-felt-like-it paces. The plan today was a tempo run and since I commited to it publicly, well you know... gotta follow through and report on success or disaster.

It was back to the awful wind and rain weather again. Woke up around 715pm (just as Andrew is likely in the middle of his run) to the sound of sideways rain beating on our windows. Briefly felt sorry for him and went back into my morning before-coffee daze. By the time I got around to starting my run it was past noon and still had the butterflies. Dragged my feet, had a banana, extra stretches, do I need a rain jacket? Looks like the rain is stopped, lets do this! Temp was about 5C (41F), cloudy, light 10mph SE wind.

After my warmup which goes straight up this 1/2 mile hill and more stretches I was off. Felt good to move the legs a bit faster but I also felt kind of clumsy and awkward. Smoothed out a bit by the end of the run but there is alot of rust/carbon in the system that must need burning out. Maybe some strides now and then would help.

Anyway... I was cruising along, just starting to feel in the groove about 10 minutes in, when this guy, obviously a lost tourist, walks out onto the golf course stops me and asks (I am not kidding!) 'Excuse me, where is the jungle?' I said 'What do you mean???' It was a language thing, he was looking for the 'forest' and 'jungle' was the word that came out. I explained between gasps that there was no jungle but that he could find his forest off in another direction (he wanted the walking trail). Looking at his clean shiny shoes I also suggested the paved golf course path we were standing on would be better and that he might get very wet (and dirty) on the trail (in the jungle). Strange encounter and I was off again and my HR obviously needed encouragement to get back up to speed.

The rest of the run was uneventful except that it started to rain with the wind picking up a bit and was glad that I decided to wear a windbreaker today. It was quite a comfortable pace with HR between 80-90% max and felt like I could maintain this for awhile. I usually push the pace/effort a bit more to the high end on tempos to feel like 1/2 marathon pace but kept it midrange today. Felt good, powered up the hills and backed off a bit as needed to keep from going over the redline. Overall 70% of the run was in the planned range and the time of 43:00 for the 5.5 mile loop was 5:30 faster than yesterday. This will be the standard for the weeks to come. Interesting run and looking forward to repeating it ;-)