Fury conquers all

My training is starting to go awry. After several months of perfect scheduling, it seems like things are starting to unravel. And I blame the snow. Montgomery County state of emergency means the pool is closed, 4+ foot snow banks from plows make sidewalks and curbs un-runnable, and the whole snow/wet thing makes biking impossible. I've been able to run and bike indoors, but I haven't been able to swim since Wednesday. And that's really bad. Hopefully Montgomery County will end its state of emergency by the weekend so I can start swimming again. It's got me pretty nervous. It feels like the weather and I are just fighting over my training.

Kind of like Godzilla and King Kong fighting over this castle.

Yesterday I met up with Michelle and Brian for a treadmill tempo run. 4 miles easy, 4 miles tempo. About 3.5 miles into the easy half, I started cramping up. I hadn't eaten since breakfast (only had 1 packet of oatmeal) and hadn't drank anything since the night before. Add to that quad soreness from the long snow run, and I was in line for a bad workout. And it got worse, a mile into the tempo half I was feeling miserable and had to run around 6:00/mile, which is about 20 seconds slower than tempo pace for me. Michelle was catching up to me. But after that first mile passed, I started feeling the FURY. Motivated by my own anger and Michelle's Michelleness, I sped up gradually to my usual tempo pace and was able to finish the last 1.5 miles at tempo and faster. The workout left something to be desired, but I got over the mental block I was having. Mental strength had been a weakness toward the end of 2009, but I'm conquering it. I ran FURIOUSLY.

Here's hoping for an incorrect weather forecast.