Half Marathon Training: Getting Back on the Horse

I went out on a run today.  MapMyRun says that my previous run was 28 days ago...  seems about right.  Ugh.  Half marathon training was going quite well, all things considered.  But then I got a piece of glass in my hand, switched to a 50 hour workweek, and then we hit a deer in the Yaris, halfway to Colorado.  I'd been planning on taking the week of the vacation to do some easy runs u[ in the mountains.  After the accident, that got derailed.  And of course, I had not been anticipating missing the over two weeks of training that came before that.  But...  that's life, I guess.

The good news is that I went today, so now it's only been a few hours since my last run, not 28 days!  Progress.  I know the more that I practice, the more successful I will be at getting my fitness levels to where they were.  I also know that I will not be able to jump immediately back into training for the Chicago Half Marathon.  However, as I've said before, the race is not until September.  I still have plenty of time to train, and lord knows I have the wherewithal and the strength somewhere inside of me.  I just have to get a little bit of motivation back, and the mental fortitude to get past those first few challenging miles before it's smooth sailing again, before I settle into the routine again.

So yeah, today I ran 2.5 miles from the apartment over to the auto shop to pick up T.'s car (he got the windows tinted on his sweet new ride).  There were a few things that worked against me a little bit for the jaunt, right off the bat--it was my first run in weeks and it was quite warm out, at 80 degrees.  The last time I went out for a run it would have been somewhere between 50-60 degrees, so the heat was a little bit of a shock to the system.  I was hydrated and took a bottle of water with me but the warmer weather is an adjustment that I will have to get used to.  

One other tough part of the run was that I came across a pretty serious car accident when I got to the start of the second mile.  It was the smell of it, and the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, and the smashed up front end of the sedan that was diagonal in the intersection.  It was a very physical experience and I wasn't really expecting that I would react as I did.  I know that is something that will get better in time as well, the more I process it and talk about it and experience those kind of situations.  

It was tough, and I had to walk parts of it, but I made it, my first run in nearly a month.  A very slow 2.5 miles, but 2.5 miles nonetheless!  And anyway, it can only go up from here!