Being Flexible

And no, I'm not referring to doing more yoga.

If you know me, it may not surprise you to learn that I'm not much of a "go with a flow" kind of person. I once dated a guy who's motto was that, and it should come as no surprise that he is not the guy that is my husband.

I love a plan.

I *live* for a plan.

I appreciate a good plan.

And I will be the first to admit that when my plan doesn't pan out, I kind of lose my shit a little bit. Yes, this is a major flaw of mine, and yes, I'm trying to work on it.

Last Thursday night, I was amped up to do our speed work session. It was cold out, but not nearly as cold as the prior night, and I love speedwork, and based on some new 5k race times, Toni and I have some new target paces to shoot for in said speed work sessions.

All systems go.

Let's do this.

So when we pulled up to the track at 6pm, in the pitch black dark, and I noticed the track covered in sparkly white snow....

I lost my shit.

My first thought was: I want to go home. Eff this.

My second thought was: I should probably let Toni weigh in on this before I decide.

We consulted from the warmth of her matching Subaru our options:

1. Do the workout as prescribed. (Probably not, my back is hurting and I don't want to risk an injury.)
2. Do the workout with less of a focus on our paces for the speed work. (maybe this is dependent on the track conditions)
3. Run 9 miles, no workout. (You couldn't pay me to do 9 miles on a track if there's no specific workout planned and I don't know this area well enough to do a 9 mile route on the fly, also neither of us brought reflective gear or headlamps because we'd PLANNED to do the track)
4. Go home. (not a bad idea, it's starting to look like)

We finally settled on doing our 2 mile warm up and deciding from there. Grumble grumble. Two laps into our warm up, I was shocked to learn that we had only ran half a mile in the six years that we'd been out there, running through crunchy snow, and I was mentally done. "I'm calling it quits at a mile." Toni was smart and didn't try to convince me otherwise, "ok."

We finished and I think Toni could see I was on the verge of losing my shit (or perhaps that it had already been lost somewhere around our second lap on the track) and she convinced me to spend some time writing out #jeroni in the snow. Thank goodness for this runner girl.

So I guess this is a reminder for myself and others who like a plan, that perhaps a back up plan isn't a terrible idea, especially in the winter. If I could go back and do it again, we should've just gone and run 9 miles. But I didn't know the area we were in by the track and had no clue what a 9 mile route would look like. Had I known the track was going to be covered in snow, we could've just done our normal route.

Lesson learned.

Also lesson learned that I still have a ways to go on my mental toughness game. Uff.