Frustration!!!

I am so frustrated right now! I'm mad at myself, although my reason for being mad isn't something I did knowingly.

My run on Saturday morning was supposed to be 7 miles. I use a Nike +, but it's not always completely accurate, so I always map out my route on mapmyrun.com before I go to make sure it's the right distance. I had a route planned out that was actually about 7.4 miles, so I decided I would either stop running at the 7 mile mark and walk the last part, or run the whole thing, depending on how I was feeling.

It was a beautiful morning for a run, and I was feeling good. Then about 1.5 miles in I realized that, well, let's just say I did not give myself enough time between my pre-run hydration and my actual run. I realized I needed to change my route to include a bathroom of some sort. I knew there were bathrooms at the public park, so I decided to skip one loop of road and detour through the park. My thinking was that going through the park was adding on some distance, so by taking away that one loop, everything would even out. Plus I had that .4 extra miles on there anyway. I figured I would still end up reaching 7 miles.

After my brief stop and a city park port-a-potty (EEWWWW!!!), I was feeling good about the rest of my run and knew I would be able to do 7 miles, no problem. I knew that my Nike + was a little bit ahead of where I was distance wise, so I knew that when it told me I had hit the 7 mile mark, I needed to go a bit further. I ran all the way to my end point, and when I got there it told me I had gone 7.3 miles. I figured that was a safe amount over, and that it was probably actually about 7 miles.

I still wanted to double check, so when I got home, I plugged in the route I had actually run on mapmyrun.com. 6.65 miles!!!! GGRRRR!!! I was so mad that I hadn't actually gone my 7 miles! Now, the bright side to this is that I felt great when I finished running, so I know that I could have easily run another 1/2 mile, but I was lacking that satisfaction of reaching a goal and running the distance I set out to run. Very annoying.

This coming week is supposed to be a "drop-back" week. In the training plan that I'm following, the long runs get progressively longer each week by one mile, except every third week goes down a bit. So instead of going 6-7-8-9, my plan goes 6-7-5-9. I already am not a big fan of this, and had decided that for now I was going to go with 6-7-8-9, until I get into the really high mileage and maybe need that drop-back. Saturday's run also confirmed for me that that is what I want to do. So, 8 miles this Saturday! Hopefully that will give me that goal-reaching-satisfaction that I'm itching for!

Miles this week: 16 miles (we'll just round up to make it easier...)
Weeks of training finished: 14 weeks
Total miles of training: 163 miles