Cologne's Green Belt

The funny thing about rain when you run is the sudden impulse to get back into the car/home quickly. Only then you realize you've spent the past hour running away from the car/home, and it is nowhere in sight. And then it hits you that an hour of running in one direction is a very hard thing to quickly render undone, especially in the middle of a forest. So you get philosophical about running in the rain, and spend the next hour convincing yourself how much you love being wet (which you don't), and how it beats the hell out of July's heatwave (which it does).

Run: 12 miles
Time: 1hr 55m
Where: Cologne's finest wooded area (thank you Mr. Adenauer!)
Overall Impression: Wet (W)

In a wierd way, I'm as happy with this run as last week's barnstormer. I was tired all week, and I really wanted to take it easy. The main hurdle with that is convincing yourself that its more pleasant to run 12 miles in 120 minutes instead of 108. Especially when its raining, and twelve minutes is roughly equivalent to the time it would take to drive back home and jump in a hot shower.

But my legs were loving me for it. I was able to stride without any of the twinges that have been hitting my hips or quads, and I really got to appreciate some beautiful greenery and a lot of lakes. Apparently Adenauer had the area forested as a social work project, because there was no bay to build bridges over. They even put a lot of sheep in there...All in all, it felt oddly English (although I read they populated it with american trees, known worldwide for their robust bark and christian values). I even caught myself looking the wrong way once at an intersection.

Only around six miles in did I start to fatigue, which I expected considering the way I felt all week. It was mostly my calves though, and I think that mentally I was getting tired of the rain. I basically sped up to almost a nine-minute mile at that point, figuring my muscles were loose enough to handle the exertion.

All the same, I felt so much relief when I was finished, I think I was just thrilled to have accomplished it. And that, boys and girls, is the moral of my week. If you lined up my two distance runs of the last week beside each other, this is the one that will most likely remember my marathon. I'm not good enough to go in there and try and sprint the whole thing. I just want to finish it. And it's going to have to be a relaxed pace, more than a little endurance, and the need to just make it to the end that will get me there.

Just remind me of that in a month, okay?