Managing Your Boss To Get A Run In

I overslept this morning. My wife woke me at 6:05am asking me if I was going to run. I really did not have time since she leaves with my older son to drive carpool around 7:15am. So I was stuck - either run at lunch or no run today.

As soon as I logged into my work computer, I saw a large empty chunk of time from 12 noon to 2pm. Hooray! I'm running at lunchtime!

However, as I was going through my emails, I received one from my boss who decided to move a meeting from 10am to 1pm. Oh man!

I started thinking about this meeting. The other PM on the project was not in the office today and was returning tomorrow. Also, there hasn't been much going on from my end with this project. It sounded like a waste of 30 minutes to me - plus it would stop me from my lunchtime run.

So...I replied to my boss giving him and update with my portion of the project, explaining that the other PM is not in the office and that it would be much better to meet tomorrow morning.

A few hours later I received the notice moving the meeting to tomorrow. YES!

My 11am meeting finished a little early and I was out the door by 11:45am. My plan - do my 7.4 mile neighborhood loop as a tempo run. One easy, warm-up mile; six miles at a "10K pace", cooldown for the rest.

My 10K PR is at a 9:03/mile pace. Since I feel I'm likely in the best shape of my life (except for about 10 more pounds that I should lose), I decided I would try to do the tempo portion at a 9 minute mile. Either I would crash and burn, or I would know that I could go for a 10K PR after the marathon :-)

I ran my warm-up mile in 9:45. I have no idea what my HR really was for that mile as I was getting false readings in the 190s and 200s. However, I pretty much knew my heart was not working that hard so I ignored heart rate on this run.

As I started to push the pace at the start of mile 2, I started to get a side stitch - probably from my mid-morning granola bar. Grrrr. I thought there that I would do one mile at tempo and then see if I could continue.

The side stitch disappeared at some point during mile 2. At the end of that mile is a monster hill - I hoofed it up and hit my first tempo split at 8:59.

That would be the closest I would get to a 9 minute mile. I found another gear somewhere and hit splits of 8:31, 8:29, 8:54, 8:16 and 8:40. Holy cow!!!!

To put this into perspective, the last 10K I ran was the Turkey Chase on Thanksgiving morning. I had a time of 1:00:30 for 6.2 miles. I ran the first 7 miles of my run today in 1:01:35...and this included a "warm-up" mile.

As long as I stay healthy after the marathon, I should be able to bring my 10K PR down on Thanksgiving morning. Watch out turkeys!