7 miles

Last night I felt like I was trying to start a cold, which isn't anything unusual for me, as soon as I start back into a running plan I come down with a cold. I decided that a dose of NyQuil and some sleep would probably help me out. It did, I slept for just shy of 12 hours, which gave me and the hubby a very late start to our 7 mile run. We had a quick breakfast and packed up plenty of water to take with us.

It wasn't until we were heading out the door that I realized that my Garmin wasn't charged. I knew that I hadn't charged it last night but I had charged it the night before and had only used it on the 4 mile walk that I had done so I was really confused why my battery was completely dead. I decided to grab my charger and plug it in while we drove to the park to do our 7 miles and my watch was only charged to 12%. I had wanted to run the Riverfront Trail and so even though it was almost noon and it was getting warmer we decided to drive to the Riverfront Trail head to do our 7 mile and to give my watch a little more time to charge. By the time we made it there my watch was at 24%, my husband told me to try turning off the bluetooth to try to give my watch a little longer run time, which was brilliant! My watch ended up being at 24% when I plugged it back in at the end our run.

The trail is really neat, it is 11.8 miles long and starts in downtown St. Louis, and runs along the Mississippi River on the Missouri side. We did 3.5 miles out and back, it was pretty cool, we started out by the old city power plants and walked along the levees and under the old railroad tracks. There were two rest stops in the 3.5 miles that we did, one was just a water fountain but the other had a water fountain, port a potties, and a building that has a deck with picnic tables that overlooked the river. It also had bike racks for all the bicyclists to park their bikes. We even saw a bike cop at one point which was nice to know that they have someone patrolling the area. The only thing about the trail that I wasn't a fan of was that several times we were passed by cars on the trail, there were multiple fishing areas and also in some of the industrial areas there was access to the river so people were driving on the trail at times.

During the first part of our run we were doing just fine and since my hubby needed an extra half mile, he quite literally ran circles around me a couple of times. I actually had a little bit of trouble keeping my heart rate high enough at first and found myself having to jog or power walk to keep my heart rate in the 137-147 range. The course was relatively flat except for a couple of steep hills where we got on and off of the earthen levee, that seemed to be the only time I was really have trouble keeping my heart rate in range. While my times are not the fastest out there I did complete all 7 miles and my slowest mile was 21:58 which is better than my five mile the other day.

Since I have been working out more in the past few days my work out clothes are mostly dirty, I ended up wearing a black of workout pants and a race top from last year. The top was a little uncomfortable and after a while I started to get really hot so I did something I thought I would never do in public, I took off my shirt and I bared my belly and my highlighter yellow sports bra. It took me a little to get over the initial "OMG I'm not wearing a shirt, people can see my fat!" but I did and no one seemed to care, maybe they thought something but no one said anything to me and no one fell off of their bike and I felt a lot better not having it on. I don't think I will be making it a regular thing but it was nice to cool off.

Overall it was a good day and a decent training run. I still feel weird calling it a run when my overall average pace is 18:45. I'm having a little pain in my left glute and I'm a little sun brunt on my face but I'm proud that I got out and did the 7 miles!