Wet, Highly Motivated 4 Miles

At some point, I'd had visions of running 7 miles around my Lake Nokomis route.  I don't know what I was thinking.  This day didn't have 7 miles in it.  This day had 2 naps in it.  When I woke up from the second nap at 5:30pm, it started to rain.  Now I'll never run.  The rain stopped after a few minutes and I could see the sun peaking out behind some clouds.  I checked the radar and all was good. See the picture? No rain near me..  I decided I could get in a nice 4 mile workout before sunset and hit the road.

Motivation to get out the door was wearing my favorite pair of running shorts and also a new pair of running socks.  Additional motivation was that I'd planned to let myself listen to Pandora on my phone as I ran.  No, I am not making this up.  It all worked to get me out the door.  I started to feel better and by better I mean awake the moment I got out there, and busted out a fairly quick warmup mile.

Then I rounded on Lake Hiawatha and saw what was waiting for me.  Where did that come from?  The radar was clear?!?  Suddenly I found a whole new motivation for hauling ass.  Mile 2 appears slow from the splits but I stopped moving completely long enough to dig my phone out and take a panorama shot, so I'm not sweating it.  All those splits were way faster than I meant to run tonight. 

The rain started after I'd completed mile 2.  Mile 3 was sort of wet, but I was running down by the creek under a ceiling of cottonwood trees, so I had a lot of shelter.  By mile 4, the rain had lost something of its intensity, although it was still making me grumpy.  One good bit of planning I had for the run was to wear a pair of older shoes with a new pair of socks.  So I neither cared that my shoes were wet, nor did I get blisters.  Ultimately it was good I went out and hit the workout, even though I was sort of grumpy about getting rained on and even grumpier at the unreliability of radar and my weather apps.  There's not much rain in the forecast for the next week, so the rest of my workouts should be good to go.