Wednesdays Are the Fourth Best or Third Worst

So, today is a Wednesday. If I had to put the days of the week in order of my least favorite to my favorite this is how it would go: Tuesday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday, Saturday. Basically, I am not quite sure how I feel about today or most Wednesdays in general.

My sister sent this to me a while ago knowing my animosity towards weekdays.

This particular Wednesday I am reminded of how students are heading back to school. I work on a college campus so even though I didn’t have the summer off and I am not enrolled in classes, I could still feel the shift in the air that came with school starting. Mainly more traffic, fewer seats on the train and larger herds of people to yield to in the cross walks.

Maybe that shift is why I was having a mental battle with my alarm before it even started going off this morning. I kept waking up SURE that my alarm was 5 minutes from going off. Instead it was 12:30am, 2:47am, 3:19am, etc…. Finally I looked at my phone and “saw” 5:30am. My alarm was set for 5:40am so I thought “hey might as well get up!” I proceed to roll out of bed and get dressed for the gym, while simultaneously trying to convince myself I should probably just go back to bed, sleep until 7 and go to the gym AFTER work (this conversation happens every morning). It was most likely due to my ongoing inner monologue that I neglected to look at an actual clock until I was almost out the door. When I finally did I saw that it was 4:00am… No WAY was I going to the gym at 4:00am even if I was already up and dressed! I guess I had dreamed looking at my phone at seeing it as 5:30am? Regardless, I climbed back into bed and slept another wonderful hour and a half before actually getting up (again while telling myself I should just keep sleeping) and going to the gym.

Today’s run was 7 X 800 with 400 recovery jogs. For those of you not familiar with runner lingo that means seven half mile intervals at a fast pace with quarter mile jogs in between – also tack on a warm up and cool down at the beginning and end. I tend to love interval workouts because they pass so fast. You aren’t thinking about it by mile or minute, but rather by interval and for me it just goes by so much faster. I ended up doing a 1 mile warm up, my intervals at a 7:30 pace (7:25 and 7:20 for my last two), my recovery jogs at 9:10 (last two also faster), one slower interval after my seven at a 8:00 min pace and finishing with a half mile cool down. All in all I did about seven and a quarter miles. 

This was a hard run. It reminded me that even though there are SO many things that go into making a run good or bad it really takes the planets aligning for it to be ideal. Today, cardiovascular-wise, I felt great. My breathing was even and I felt strong through the end of each of my intervals and could have probably gone faster. My legs felt only okay and borderline lead-like, however. I can tell they are starting to get tired and they rebelled against the speed a little. My stomach was the real thing weighing me down today. For most of the run I felt sick during my intervals and had some sharp pains occasionally and just felt off overall. However, the longer I ran and the more I warmed up the better it felt and by the end of my session I felt 100 times better. 

Going forward I can’t promise what I’ll write on here. I want a way to talk about mine and Ben’s everyday life, but I also want an outlet to talk about my running and training. Nevertheless, I plan to write pretty regularly and welcome friends, family and online cyber lurkers to partake as they see fit!