Every run has its challenge

Every run has its challenges. And, as I said before, a large majority of those challenges are mental. Sometimes we overcome the challenges completely, sometimes only partially and sometimes not at all.

"Challenges" include telling yourself all sorts of excuses to dissuade yourself from running, or from running as much as you should.

Wednesday's run for novices (read: me) was scheduled to be 15km. After the Onday night run Chaim said on Wednesday we should do 18km on Wed. Could be he was referring to the advanced runners, as that is what they were scheduled to run, but he also told me, so i think he was changing it to 18 for everybody.

But 18km locally is hard to run. Where do you go? Run around the neighborhood a bunch of times? Seems very boring. At night and early morning, the highways are not lit up, so you cannot run there, so the only option is just to run around the neighborhood itself...

The only hours I can run during the week are at night or very early morning, and 18km needs a block of nearly 2.5 hours (about 1:50 for the run plus warm-up and cool down times, and time to get home and shower and all that). So a mid-week run for that distance is very difficult.

Also, Wednesday I could not run, for technical reasons. Instead I ran Thursday morning. Thursday morning has an additional challenge that on Friday we have a long run (25km) scheduled. So you don't want to run too much on Thursday, and be tired and worn out for Fridays run.

So I decided to get up early and run around Dolev a bunch of times, until I get sick of it, and then run around the perimeter until I have had enough. After running around the Dolev loop 6 times, I decided I had had enough. I could complete the run by running down Yarden to yarqon to Kishon and then back home, cutting the run short at around 10km.

In the end I ran 11.08 km at an average pace of 6:00/km.

Not only is it hard to find places to run locally to get enough distance, but also when you are just running aimlessly, with no real destination or goal, you also run slower. If you are running to get somewhere, such as Rehovot, for example, or even just some final destination, so you can pace yourself at a certain speed and just keep going. But when you have nowhere specific to go, you run slower...

Anyway, so I found enough excuses to shorten todays run. Objectively some of the excuses are good, so maybe it is justified and not really a failure, but subjectively they are still just excuses, and I ran less than the amount I should have run.