…And the Pittsburgh Penguins have lost their mojo, but I won’t bore you with that.

I will, however, bore your with details of some of the decisions I made tonight.

Rain showers, 40 degrees, feels like 32, wind @ 15 mph. Ashley and I decide to meet at the track for some 800s.

We may also have decided to cut the workout short since we were frozen and soaked to the bone. Also, a wind gust knocked me from the track onto the field. Wicked.

3.5 miles in that was more than enough. When I got in my car, I changed out of my soaked wind-breaker jacket (I was hoping it was waterproof, but apparently not), and into a black running pullover. When I pulled up to my house, the rain had mostly stopped and I may have made the decision to run another mile and a half… dressed entirely in black… at night…with no reflectors.

Like I’ve said, my decisions tonight reflect the fact that my mind is MIA.

I survived, no thanks to myself. And I managed 5 miles with an 8:34 pace. I had a couple miles in there under an 8 minute pace. Go me!

And speaking of running paces, have you ever used the McMillan Pace Calculator? It’s an online tool for you to plug in your race times and it calculates training paces for you.

Basically, you pick a distance and enter your most recent time and it tells you how fast you should be running different runs and workouts. I was shocked at how off my times are. I had read somewhere (I think it was in “Born to Run”) that most people run their slow runs too fast and their fast runs too slow. This calculator confirmed that. A long run between 10:05 and 11:05 min/mile?!

This is based on my 1:59 half marathon (from 9/10…a long time ago!)

The website also suggests inputing your goal time so that you can watch your training times get closer to those results as your get further into your training.

And there you have it. I may have made some idiot decisions tonight, but it was a good one to play around on that website.

Now if only the Pens would decide to start playing again, that’d be great.

Have you used a pace calculator before? What’s the worst weather you’ve run in?

As gross as tonight was, I’ve run in much worse weather…long runs negative degrees with bitter wind chills. Running makes you crazy, I guess.