Last Tuesday I was running,

I have a running Ap on my Android phone and it times a 5 min warm-up walk and beeps at 2.5 minutes and again when I reached the end of the 5 minute period. The timer is suppose to time the specific run for that day, according to the program I was training with, and let me know when I reached the 1/2 way point so I could turn around and head back.  It worked well for the warm-up walk and then I started running.

I also wear a watch that has a stopwatch and heart monitor so I usually have a backup for the time I am running.  Well on Tuesday 5/17/2011 I ran and I passed the 1 mile point on my run.  At the 1.2 mile point I turned and started running up hill.  I ran and ran and thought boy this is taking a long time.  I came upon a woman with two large dogs and when she saw me she grabbed one and was putting a leash on him.  The other dog moved out into the trail, so I just ran in place until the woman could restrain him also (it was a welcome relief to not be moving uphill)  I then looked at my watch and noticed that I hadn't started the stop watch.  "grrrr" was all I could get out of my mouth - no air for anything else.  I then checked my phone and I still had about two minutes to run in the out bound direction, so I put my mind somewhere pleasant and looked at the trail about 9' in front of me and plodded on.  and on... and on ... and on.

Finally I came to a tree that had fallen across the trail and I clambered over it continued plodding up the hill - I took the phone out of my pocket thinking "these two minutes sure are lasting forever!"  I saw that I had been running for about 18 1/2 minutes.  I couldn't believe it - I hadn't heard the phone beep to have me turn around at 12.5 minutes.  I have to admit that I was pretty proud of myself - I had never ran so far up the hill before.  I decided that I would turn around and run down hill and I would run as long as I could before stopping.  At 36 minutes I decided perhaps I should stop before I hurt myself, as I had run 11 minutes longer than the training schedule called for and I didn't want to over do it and get to sore to run on Thursday.  I knew that I had run at least 3.1 miles - the length of a 5K.  I actually ran at least 3.5 miles that day - I measured it on Saturday, but forget the exact distance.