Run Forrest! Ruuuuuun!

The weather here was pretty nice today, so I decided to take it to the streets - that's right, rather than run on the treadmill, I decided to hit the boardwalk. I figured I can easily run 3 miles on the treadmill, so the boardwalk (which, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is 2.2 miles long, thus "running the boardwalk" = 4.4 miles) should not be that much harder, right?

Wrong.

I hadn't done any running other than on the treadmill, and it certainly was harder than I thought it would be...you don't have the treadmill to keep your pace, you need to do it yourself. You don't have the shock-absorption of the treadmill to protect your knees either - and admittedly, the boardwalk is surely better than concrete, but still...I was feeling it.

However...I did it. Ran the whole thing - it took me around 45 minutes, which wasn't super fast, but I ran the whole damn thing. Kinda cool. When I got to the end, it was a very strange feeling - my legs were kinda on auto pilot, so it was difficult to make them stop. Once I convinced them to do so, my left knee started to ache, as well as my left hip joint. Yikes...I started having visions of strained ligaments and physical therapy and pain and....and....and....and then, about 2 minutes later the pain stopped completely. Guess the ol' joints just aren't used to such abuses. Perhaps running 3 days in a row didn't help matters.

All in all, quite the accomplishment if I do say so myself. It hurt, yes, but I will continue to do it as the weather improves. Maybe if I do it on a less windy day (I forgot to mention that I was running into the wind on the initial half of the run), as well as after having rested my limbs a few days, then it will hurt less. Either way, I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that I could run the whole boardwalk...and in 45 mins no less. Pretty damn cool.