I’m pretty psyched to say that when I left my apartment I planned to run 3 miles, and when I came home my GPS announced that I had completed 7 miles.  Not too bad for a Monday night.  At this point in my training, I would have been happy to do that on a Saturday morning. So I have to chalk it up to the one variable in tonight’s routine, the scenery, and the delusional mindset that got me through the second half.

As is the case in many aspects of life, changing the scenery can provide a different and usually positive perspective.  A change of scenery can break up the monotony of doing the same activity on a nightly basis.  Tonight was one of those runs where I could have just kept going.  While I would love to pretend that I built up my endurance enough that I am able to complete 7 miles with ease, I am positive that it had much less to do with my endurance, and much more to do with the scenery. Since my week night running path is usually congested with pedestrians, city smog, traffic lights, electric bikes (I don’t mean motorcycles…there is a clear distinction and I never thought/never wanted to experience the site of these awkward vehicles if they can even be called this) and erratic taxi drivers, running along the East River provided a much appreciated change.  By the time I got to South Street Seaport I was at 3.7 miles and I hadn’t had time to think about it because there were no lights to stop me, there were no pedestrians to dodge, and most importantly, there were no cars to nearly hit me.  Further, unlike my normal week night runs where I am doing a loop that typically equals the total distance of my half-way mark tonight, I was 3.7 miles from my starting point.  At the very least, I realized, I would have to run another 3.7 miles to call it a night.  

Still distracted by the escape from the normal city running chaos, I turned around to begin the trip home.  For whatever reason, running longer than I anticipate reminds me of a video game.  And because my scope of video game expertise is limited to Donkey Kong 1, 2 & 3 (for Super Nintendo), I started to think of this 7.4 mile run as the first level in Donkey Kong 1.  As you force Donkey and Diddy to run through the jungle in the decidedly easy level, you can do one of two things: 1) Fly through the level, get the one extra balloon (life), and move on to the next level; or 2) Go through strategically, finding each hidden bonus and obtaining several additional balloons for additional lives to use in the next levels, because you know that each level will surely be progressively more difficult than the previous level.  

I look at tonight as option 2.  Rather than running my short 3 miles, I ran a bonus 4.4 so that in the event that I find my upcoming nightly runs more difficult I can use the endurance that I built up from tonight to either push through to the next level, or use one of the bonus miles from tonight for an excuse to have an easy night.

What I’m running to: Run the World (Girls)- Beyonce