What do you do when your confidence is shattered?

I had the WORST run I have had in many months this morning. I've been having a flareup of my fibromyalgia condition which means every muscle is super tight and super sore (simplest way to explain it). So I did NOT want to run this morning. I slept in until 9 am, then forced myself to put on the running clothes, and made it out the door a little after 9:30.

It was 76 degrees and 88% humidity, but you couldn't have convinced me that it wasn't the same 95 degree weather from a month ago. I guess the last couple weeks of cooler weather and rain had de-acclimated me from the heat. I had walked out the door without a purpose for the run, whether the purpose is in the pace, the method, or the distance. I decided to just try to do a few miles at an "easy" pace. But my legs were SO heavy and each movement was painful, and today it felt like nothing was easy. I had to use a 1 to 10 scale assessment of my cardio and respiratory difficulty during the run to decide what was easy. Because my muscles were just not having it. My legs were dead, I negative self-talked the entire time, I was just miserable.

I could have stopped at 2 and felt like, "Well, a year ago I would have just not even gone out for this run." But I kept changing my route on the fly so that I couldn't be back to the house until right around 3 miles. I did 3.1 miles at 11:21 avg pace.

My confidence has been shattered after 3.1 miles of bad self-talk. You hope you can run long enough to think yourself out of that bad place in your mind but I couldn't today. I have a few running goals for the year and right now they all seem unachievable.

While Heels and Hills and Him Half Marathon next Sunday is a small race compared to some I've tackled in the past (1300 versus 4500 of the DRC Half) and this is a low-key event, there's still lots of little details to handle in the next week. But inbetween the work I have to complete today, I'm going to find some time to think about my goals for this fall and how I'm going to achieve them or alter their timeframe, and I think that reflective time will hopefully help restore a lot of the confidence I felt like I lost today.