Listening to my body

This is something I need to do more... or better. Yesterday afternoon - for reasons unbeknownst to me - I was having some really painful abdominal issues. So much so that I was concerned about making it through my last two therapy sessions. I hadn't eaten anything out of the ordinary... I don't know what it was, just one of those inexplicable things. Now, since Wednesday night was a salsa night, I didn't run yesterday morning - leaving my run for afterwork. I was hoping the pain would subside enough by then to get my run in.

I headed out to do the Sebeka loop around 6:30pm. I was looking forward to the run being over, so I went out a bit faster than I normally do. To my surprise, I felt pretty darn good and zoomed through the first two, two and a half miles at a nice clip. As I reached about the halfway point of the loop, I got a really wicked side stitch. Determined not to be a wuss, I kept running for about another quarter mile or more but eventually had to stop and walk for about a minute and a half or two. But at that point, I really wanted the run to be over, so I picked it back up to a run again - though at a considerably slower pace.

On the one hand I was disappointed because I had a really nice pace going initially and was interested to see if I could sustain it for the whole loop. On the other hand, I realized that it might not have been too wise of me to go out so fast on a day where, just hours before, I was questioning my ability to simply sit and be "therapeutic" for fifty minutes. Cramps/side stitches are uncommon for me. I know I've suffered with less than a dozen incidents like that in the seven plus years I've been running. Unfortunately, the stitch didn't really go away for the rest of the run, though it became more tolerable for the last mile, mile and a half.

Call it 6.25 in 55.