Recovery Run - Proud to be slow?

Yesterday I scheduled a recovery run into my routine for the simple sake of doing some sort of physical activity that would hopefully not impact my 5k tomorrow. Advice from my coach was to do a very easy run for only 45 minutes. I was not looking forward to it.

Due to the weather in my area, I've been a regular at my gym for my runs and have become accustomed to "showing off", or at least trying to, by killing it with my intervals and tempo runs. Being able to run 5 miles at 7.3mph or doing 400s at 8.0mph is pretty awesome, for me. Not to say that I'm some amazingly fast runner, because obviously I'm not blowing up records or anything, but I've improved so much in the past two years that I'm proud of my current speeds. And, I know for a fact that I'm often cruising MUCH faster than some of the other people on the treadmills around me. The reason I know? Because I look! :D And, you can't tell me that you aren't sneaking a peak at your neighbor's speed to see how you compare too, just like I do. I'm always curious how fast people are going and whether nor I'm going faster, it's probably that whole competitive thing that I've grabbed onto since I started racing.

So, when I arrived at the gym to do this "recovery run", I was all too happy to pick a treadmill where there were no immediate neighbors. I honestly didn't want people to see how slow I was going... 5.6mph... Embarrassing! Or was it? My goal was to do a recovery run, keep my pace slow and my heart rate down. I busted out 4 miles in 43 minutes, truly not an achievement by any means, but my average heart rate was the lowest I have ever seen it on a run of any kind. About halfway through the run I realized that it didn't matter if people were looking over at me and thinking, wow she is slow! Because really, my goal was not to kick the crap out of my pace that day, it was to just get in an easy workout, and I did that.

Now the question will be, the next time I'm there kicking it on a tempo run and I checkout my neighbor's speed... will I think to myself, dude that person is slow! if they are going 5.6mph? The answer is, yes, I probably will. But, I will then consider that they might be doing a recovery run like I did and I'll divert my focus back on my own running, which is where it probably should have been to begin with.