"There is no such thing as bad weather, just soft people."

The title of this post is a quote that has been attributed to Bill Bowerman. And although they have much harsher weather in the Northern Hemisphere than we do here in Perth, I think that it could be modified to "There is no such thing as bad weather, just soft people ... and slightly soft people who shorten their medium long runs".

We have a colourbond roof and when it bucketed down last night, it was so loud that it woke me up ... and then woke me up another few times until I was sound asleep just before my alarm went at 5.40am. Simon has lent me a couple of books, one of which is "Deek - The Making of Australia's World Marathon Champion" and in the first chapter, Deek is quoted as saying, "You must have a training routine so that what you do happens automatically. If I got up in the morning and thought about going for a run there would often be a number of possible arguments against it. The thing is to get out and run. Later you can wonder whether you should have or not". So as I was sitting there on the loo, listening to the rain continuing to come down, it was obvious that I was going to go for a run, the question was how far?

I had a 21.5km medium long run scheduled. Normally I would do this on a Thursday but I have rejigged my program for this week so that I can do a 3000m race/time trial with Sugar at Coker Park tomorrow evening. So I already had a little bit of an incentive to cut my run a bit shorter (fresher legs). In the end I decided to head out and do the long bridges and decide at the Narrows whether to carry on down the Freeway for the 21.5km (and the hills) or follow the river back for 18.7km. As it turned out, the underpass at the Causeway was flooded (again!!) so I decided to do a normal bridges loop plus the Freeway. This only works out to 15.7km which I did in 72 mins (approx 4.35/km pace).

Got absolutely drenched of course in a couple of extended downpours. Not much you can do when you are running towards the Narrows and you can see a curtain of rain coming down the river at you and blocking out the view of Kings Park. Same again running along the Freeway. Got a few friendly (sarcastic?) toots of the horn from passing motorists. There wasn't many people out at all this morning. A few cyclists commuting to work but only a handful of runners.

I'm glad I got out and did it as I find the guilt of not running pretty much unbearable. I would have been working out how I could go for a run at lunchtime (can't run after work as coaching this evening and then Rox is out later) so it was definitely a case of getting my run in before the rest of my life gets in the way.

The weather forecast for tomorrow evening is not great - breezy with showers which may not assist with running a good time. I'm looking forward to a good hard run though and would still like to think I can get close to running just under 10 mins. I have no idea if that is a realistic goal so will just have to see what happens.

One thing about having a blog - it keeps you accountable.