Crazy.  That’s probably how many of us may describe the weather these past few days.  One day it’s raining cats and dogs, then sunny as summer the next… if you’re not ready you may easily get sick.  Fortunately for me, I didn’t find myself soaking in the rain while running—because unfortunately, I missed running entirely!

After missing Milo Marathon due to unforeseen circumstances, again I missed another race last weekend—another wet one.  I was supposed to claim my kit last Saturday but as I was about to leave the house, a crazy downpour prevented me.  The traffic report on EDSA also wasn’t that motivating, so in the end I wasn’t able to claim my kit, thus no race!

Plan B.  I slept through the Sunday morning and planned on doing a long run if the good weather persisted.  I was supposed to test my brand-spanking new pair, Mizuno Wave Prophecy, but as we all know with new shoes, we don’t want it getting dirty or wet!  Since the weather last Sunday afternoon was quite volatile (and got a bit too lazy), I cancelled my long run.  Time for plan C.

Since I don’t want to risk my new shoes getting muddy and wet and all, there’s only one place I could think of where I can run regardless of the weather—run indoors!  Of course I’m not talking about our home, I’m talking about running on the dreaded treadmill.  Those who know me knows how much I hate running on treadmills because I find it boring (you can run for miles or hours and still be in one place having the same view) and I really can’t stand running on it for very long.

Since I can’t run long on treadmills there’s only one way for me to maximize my workout—do it quickly, and fast—and I mean fast!  I was supposed to do 21K that weekend, but I ended up doing 2.1K—0.1K for warm-up and the following 2K in 8:24, around 1.5K of it in sustained 15kph (4:00 pace) and at 3% gradient.  This is actually my longest time and distance to sustain such speed, and I think it’s also partially with the help of my Mizuno Wave Prophecy (will I’ll be posting a review soon).  I haven’t done speedworks in a very long time, and speedworks aren’t supposed to be very long, so it was a perfect fallback for a weekend that would’ve otherwise gone to waste.

Running is indeed a great sport.  We can do it whenever we can, wherever we want to, and however intense we desire.  For long runners like myself it’s unfortunate that we’re highly at the mercy of the weather since it would be dreadfully boring to do long runs indoors, but the nice thing is that if we can’t run long, we can choose to run fast.  Running long gives us endurance, but who wouldn’t want to run faster?   Since the weather wasn’t on my side for my long runs, might as well do some workarounds, so we may continue doing our beloved sport, whether the weather outside permits us, or not.