I am so hungry right now. Oh man.

Distance: 20.14 km

Time: 2:22:46

This morning I managed to drag myself out of bed at 6:30, and I was out the door by 7 am. It was raining just a little, it was frighteningly windy and it was absolutely freezing. I must have looked like an absolute tool, with my hood pulled up over my baseball cap and tied under my chin like I was Kenny from South Park or something, but I had the notion that my ears may well fall off if exposed to that wind. I took it easy, kept it slow, and I think the time attests to that. My average heart rate was 140, which is sort of what I was going for.

We’ve been having some pretty awful weather here in Canberra over the last week or so, and at one point I saw a huge dead tree that had snapped in half during the high winds, both halves still vaguely attached, and the top half sort of gently resting on another tree. It looked like a broken twig, even though it was a tall gum tree. I knew it had only snapped this week, as it could obviously fall any time it felt like doing so, and someone would hopefully come and lop it down before that happened. There were branches down on the path, and little mini-floods everywhere I looked. I was only thankful that it wasn’t raining any harder.

At one point, for about two minutes, it actually snowed. I wouldn’t have minded it, if all the rain had been replaced by snow. Snow is at least a novelty.

I think I might have to keep my long runs at 20k for a while. I didn’t feel too tired at the end of today’s run. In fact, I ran another five hundred metres or so after stopping the timer at a fairly brisk pace, not quite a sprint. I wasn’t quite home yet, but walking was boring. I just think that two and a half hours is quite an investment, and anything longer than this will probably require food of some description. As it is, I’ve burned quite a few calories. According to my heart rate monitor, I burned 7500 or so kilojoules (about 1800 calories) in this morning’s run and there’s nothing as inspirational as feeding that information into my calorie tracking software and having it tell me I need to eat another 13219 kilojoules (or 3162 calories) today.

Oh. Is that all? I guess two and a half day’s worth of calories will have to do me for the day. I feel so deprived. :P