TNT Day 2: Early morning is creepy

So, on Day 1, I fell asleep at 8:30 pm. My family says they miss me. I'm guessing it'll take a couple weeks to adjust to my new daily schedule. I was also ravenously hungry all day yesterday. I packed a lot more fruit in today's lunch bag.

I got up at 5:30 no problem today, probably because I got 9 hours' sleep. 

This morning's run was better than yesterday. I started stronger, and finished stronger. Still a fair amount of walking, but I used one of my 5k training apps to help me run more than walk, and ended up doing two days' workouts. Final distance: 2.5 miles (training schedule says 2-3 today, so I feel okay about it). Final time: 45 minutes. Damn, I have to work on my time! 

Three hours post-run and today my legs feel a bit tired (they didn't yesterday). 

That's all the physical stuff, but it's the mental stuff that makes training so difficult. I find the park that I usually run in rather creepy at 6 am. My mind starts thinking about rapists and how awful it would be to be attacked and how my family may never find out what happened to me, and even if I made it out alive how I wouldn't be able to do anything about it since we're in the middle of a war on my gender, and I should change my run daily so as to avoid being tracked. When my brain wears out that angle, it moves on to the other horrors that are surely lurking in the trees at the early hours. You know, like this:

Thanks to whomever put this image on the Internet. My early-morning brain will get a kick out of torturing me with it.

So I left the park today. The park that I formerly felt so secure in. And I took it to the mean streets of my mini-city inside the larger city. I took it to my friend's neighborhood. And I loved it. I ran all over that neighborhood, up one street and down the other with no mapped route in mind. I saw houses wake up and people leave for work earlier than I ever want to be at work unless it's in my pj's on my couch. My brain stopped torturing me with thoughts of rapists and demon kittens and it even stopped torturing me with thoughts about how I don't have to do this running thing, we could stop at any time, let's quit now, there's still time to grab more sleep if only I would give it up. I won't go so far as to say that I was in the zone, but I at least wasn't being tortured by my own brain. I began to really enjoy my run. I began to push myself. I got a kick out of running past my friend's house and seeing her light go on. I finished strong, and I'm proud of myself. I'm looking forward to what I may find tomorrow. As long as it's not demon kittens or rapists.