So sometimes I get blessed with these happy moments. My hubby and kiddo came in the house with Starbucks and a sandwich for me before I had a chance to start cooking. And now they are both napping in bed!!!! That buys me like an hour plus of "do nothing" and boy am I gonna sit here and do nothing
So let's see how my weekend has gone starting with Friday.
As you know I totally skipped my tempo on Thursday from just running out of time in the day. My kiddo wanted mommy time and I wanted kiddo time and she just did not want to go to bed. It happens.
So Friday night comes along and I knew I had a date with the treadmill. 1.5 mi at easy 12:58 is a cake walk, but 4 mi at tempo (9:42) on the treadmill at 9:30pm was going to take every ounce of willpower I could muster. Then I just had to convince myself to do all of the 1.5 mi cool down at 12:58 even if I knew how late it was getting.
Being at the gym on a Friday night is odd. There aren't that many people running...it's all just young guys lifting...probably so they can look good while going out. I have no basis in fact for this statement...I'm just guessing based on years of watching jersey shore.
so me and 30+ empty treadmills and a closed caption shark tank episode.
I wanted to do a Mickey miles podcast I had started but no luck. My phone was being annoying. So I just watched shark tank and switched to my preloaded offline run playlist for the tempo and cool down.
When it was time to up the pace I couldn't get my legs to do 9:42. It was soooo fast, literally felt like I must have been doing a 5 min mile. Why are treadmills like this with me? So I backed it down to like 10:00ish or close and that was better. By about .75 miles or so I was feeling fine so I upped it again to where it should be and it didn't feel as insane. I think I just need to gradually get there with the treadmill. Next time should I just start doing that before my cool down is over? Or would that be wrong?
Pro of treadmill tempo run is that taking away the mental part of seeing the miles physically yet to run frees me up to really zone out.
Con is that my body can't ebb and flow with the pace. It's literally the same thing over and over and over and over.
Also I know I've said this before but....9-10pm on television is basically "let's murder all the women and then have news reports about all the murdered women and then a hospital drama and look another murdered woman". It's starting to make me hate the gym because it's like "treadmill = bad feelings about my safety" every single time!!! I will rant about this forever.
Sorry to all crime show fans out there!
Ok, so I did it. My left knee felt a lil twingy during the end of the cool down. Maybe too much repetitive movement? Since it felt great today outside I'm not too worried.
The machine kicks off at an hour so I did have to stop and start over. Proud I didn't just stop and hop off.
Ok, to break up this word blob. Here's what I did yesterday all day.
It's fair season out here. We will go to another one today that's more of a carnival ride type one. My kiddo has all of a sudden lost all fear and wants to ride everything. Makes me so excited for her 5th birthday in WDW next fall. She's pony obsessed right now and will have a pony cake for her 4th bday coming up soon!
And here's me on a toddler ride, I barely fit. Maybe I need to keep running! Or maybe I should be proud I could cram myself onto this thing in the first place?
So today's run was 5 miles at long run pace 11.01
You can see from my spoiler post above that it went well. Of my three types of runs this one is my usual most consistent when I do get to stare at my watch. I must have judged my effort better than the last try at LR blind. I think what helped me was I picked a new route courtesy of the Chicago grid street system. I've avoided this before because I thought I'd hate it, but just decided to try it today. 2 miles out (there's three major intersections that are exactly one mile apart by me) and 2 miles back and then one final square near my house that you turn right every .25 miles aka 2 long blocks and 4 short blocks.
I liked this route! Surprise to me! Maybe I'd hate it if it was hotter and sunnier. But on a breezy kind of overcast day I liked the straight miles. Maybe helped me stay in my zone.
I nearly hit mile two perfectly and the rest ended up being faster but smidges faster. Mile 3 had some slight downhill that I knew was coming only after some slight uphill to finish mile 2. But this is Chicago, so anyone who runs hills would laugh at me if they ran my "hills."
I felt good. I could run longer at this 11 pace. Makes me think I could do a half marathon at that pace. Which I think is what my current 10k proof points to with the Macmillan calculator. But of course with poodles of training. (I meant oodles, autocorrect fail)
Ok I've typed way too much now.
Btw I'm making Korean pork tacos for dinner tonight. So my main goal once my people wake up is to not undo all my hard work with too many fried foods on sticks today.
I don't have a good idea of whether or not the price could potentially drop but I am going to keep checking back.
