Go for a run! Save the environment!
It took everything I had to move my butt off the lukewarm kitchen radiator this morning. The argument went: the sooner you move and change clothes, the sooner you will get the run done, and the sooner you will be warm. But, I’ve had this problem my whole life. When I am cold, I can’t move. The rational thinker in me knows that movement generates heat. So I should move around a lot when I am cold. It also should help that what I’d be moving to will usually warm me up. In my gallery of childhood memories, I can still hear my mother telling me, as I stood shivering with a towel around me, if I’d just get out of the bathtub and dry off, I’d be a lot warmer. I knew she was right. But, I still couldn’t do it. Sometimes I still have this problem.
Kermit’s right, man. It’s not easy being green. This winter, I’ve been trying so hard not to turn the heater on until the evening when Crunchy husband comes home. (As you can see from the first sentence, this didn’t quite happen today. But it’s off again now.) However, sometimes a sweater or even a jacket doesn’t do the trick. So I try to think of other ways to stay warm (that don’t include snuggling under the warm duvet!). Take a hot shower. Hmmmm…If I’m cold outside the shower but warm inside the shower, chances are it’s going to be a long shower, and waste a lot of water and energy warming the water. So that’s no good. I could stand around the stove warming my hands. But that wastes gas. Go to a shopping center where they’ve got the heat pumped up anyway, so I might as well benefit from it. But, that wastes energy getting there if there’s no other reason for the trip.
So it’s getting easier and easier to motivate myself to get out and run when it’s cold. Or, maybe it’s better to say that I am wasting less time sitting on my bed trying to convince my brain to tell my arms just to take off my semi-warm pajamas and put on my cold running clothes because the sooner I do that the sooner I will be warm again.
Now I am back, and I am nice and toasty. The run felt like it sucked. I was supposed to pick up the pace a bit today, and it kind of hurt in my lungs to push myself out of my comfort zone. I was feeling frustrated about it, even considering the route is hilly. Turns out I wasn’t doing the math quite right in my head as I went along, so I feel a little better. And, it did have the positive effect of generating great amounts of body heat. So I am happy now.
Go for a run! Be warm! Save the environment!
Today’s run
Distance: 3.2 miles
Time: 29:54
Pace: 9:20 min/mile