The dark side

I have crossed over to the dark side.  And I think I like it here.  

I have logged plenty of miles in less than ideal weather conditions before today.  Hot, humid, snow, rain, wind, you name it.  I begrudgingly laced up and hit the road.  In my mind, that earned me my stripes and I could call myself a runner.  But I never felt like one of "those" runners, the bat shit crazy kind...until today.  The difference in today's dark, torrentially rainy, windy-as-hell 8 mile tempo run was that I enjoyed it.  Not only that, but I actually looked forward to it.  Who the hell looks forward to getting up at 5am when it's raining buckets with 25 mph winds and then running balls to the wall for an hour while the rest of the world is sleeping?  Why, bat shit crazy runners, of course!  Gimme my badge, I am one of you now.

I haven't run a race in 6 months, and with the Wicked 10K just two weeks away, I'm starting to get really excited.  Despite running a PR, I was not pleased with my performance in last year's race.  I felt I was on cruise control for the first 5 miles, but then my body betrayed me on the last mile and I had to walk for a minute because of a nasty side stitch.  Nobody makes me bleed my own blood, so I'm out for redemption this year!  The training plan outlined in Run Less, Run Faster has been the boss of me for the past 8 weeks, and I should PR with relative ease.   To up the ante a bit, I'm hoping to break into the top 10 of my (new) age group, and I'm shopping around to get ideas for what I will buy myself as a reward if I do.  I'm thinking a brightly colored windbreaker for those early morning rainy, windy runs would be just lovely.