That’s what I said comparing today’s run (well, it’s now early Saturday instead of Friday, but whatever) to Wednesday’s run would be like. I intended to do another 3 mile run, the same course, so I could have three runs in a row to compare, hoping to have a sub-11:00/mi pace today. But when I got to the top of the first hill, my body and my brain were both in agreement: I should cross the intersection and go up the next hill. So, it became a 4 mile run instead. Only problem was the app I’m using, if you’ve set a distance target, once you hit that target, it stops telling or displaying how far you’ve gone. It just displays that you have 0.0 miles to go. So I ended up stopping the official run at 3.92 miles, though I did cover enough in cool down to get 4.

When I got to the top of the next hill, and as I approached the traffic light, my belly, my lungs, and my quads were in agreement: I should head east at the light, get to my halfway point and turn around. That would prevent me from having to run down the other side of the hill, and then back up it. My brain though, it said, “Hey, as long as you give me the right song when we get to the intersection, I’m there!”

I’m still fast when sufficiently motivated by the right tune. Oh, and gravity.

I was basically trying to do a fartlek workout that became a hill workout as well, so this playlist is a pretty decent one for fartlek. Surfing With A Spoon was better for the uphill than I thought it would be. The end of Home was playing as I went 5:05; it was pretty decent for the pace. The only issue was I was at the end of the song, and there’s a bit of live outtro that didn’t help me keep up the pace. It was okay though. My body didn’t really want to keep it up much longer. I then reached 2 miles and turned around to go back up the hill.

After I was back on the relatively flat crest of the big second hill, I hit the lead up to the repeated but unanswered question, “Is It Now?”. I wasn’t intending to run fast, but that became the spike after the big spike in the middle.

As I approached the downhill of the second hill, I was listening to Summer Song, but was going to run out of fast tempo, so I switched it back to Is It Now? and got that third spike, at a 6:02 pace.

Summer Sessions Eye was a decent song for finishing out the downhill of the first hill. I feel like Impossible Shame would have been great for more fartlek if I had realized I wasn’t at 4 miles yet. The last two were cool down, but would have been good for fartlek as well.