How About Dem Fartleks?

A tempo run was on the schedule for today but my Garmin was sitting on my desk at work. Little good that would do me keeping to a defined pace sitting on my desk.  My options were to go back to bed but since I was already awake I knew I wouldn't fall back asleep.  Or I could do strengthening exercises, push-ups, sit-ups, monster walks, etc. I needed to get a run in though so I headed out the door thinking I would just try a tempo run anyways.  

After a short warm-up when I picked up the pace I realized a tempo run really wouldn't work because I didn't know my pace not to mention I'm lazy and really don't care for tempo runs.  Plan B was formed....fartleks...2 minutes of running at a picked up pace and 1 minute of easy.  The 3 miles to my turn-around point flew by.  On the way back though my pace on my 2 minutes got slower and the minute of easy got longer.  It was still a quality workout.

With a 1.5 miles to go I realized that although I had used the bathroom before I left, my body was asking for a bush stop, which I denied.  I got to thinking about when I started using the term "bush stop".  In 2000 I had an opportunity to visit Ukraine and village when my ancestors came from. The Ukraine had very primitive bathroom facilities.  While most homes had an outhouse, you didn't know the condition it would be in. Some had just a hole in the ground, some had a platform box so you could sit and even others had confiscated a toilet seat.  In a real city, you could possibly have running water with a real toilet and maybe, just maybe toilet paper.  Usually there was no toilet paper but maybe a book or magazine.  Anyways, because of the infrequency of facilities and the fear of falling in when there were facilities, it was more desirable to stop along side the road and do a "bush stop". I used to have a picture of our group scattering from our mini-van to make the "bush-stop" but I must have lost it when I lost my external hard drive a number of months ago. Here is one picture that I did find of an outhouse WITH a door.  When there was a door, it was often green.  Go figure.

Happy Running!