The early bird gets...sore knees

Today: 13.92km (about 0:05:00/km) and 1500m swimming

So I woke up this morning at about 5:45am and drank a cup of hot chocolate hoping it would put me to sleep--to no avail. According to my handydandy Mac Dashboard weather widget, it was about 4 degrees, so I decided to go for a run.

I don't think I've ever fully expressed the true depth of my love for Sue and Paul's Gmap Pedometer. Paul is training for a marathon and uses something akin to a Google Map to plot out routes. Double-click on a point on the map to record a point and each turn you make, plot another point. It measures the distance in metric or imperial measures and also plots an elevation profile (although I have yet to determine how accurate it is).

Anyways, at 6am, I plotted out a tentative 11km route, but once I got out to Portsmouth Village, I decided to scrap the whole plan and just see how far I could (reasonably) go without hurting myself and also given the incredibly windy conditions. So I found myself running up past Saint Lawrence College and out to Bath Road instead of turning right at Portsmouth Ave. and then right again at Johnson. Here's the actual route map. For the last Johnson-King-Barrie loop, I had a fellow runner on my tail--for some reason I was feeling particularly competitive and sprinted past him/her farther up on Johnson, but had to keep a pretty painful pace to stay ahead. Oh well, it's like practice for next week I suppose.

Note about the routes: at the end of both, there is one more short 2k loop that goes down Johnson to King, right at King to Barrie, right at Barrie to Earl. I think that shallow hill on Barrie is the most painful part of the whole thing. :)