Runnin' on Empty

Last week I was a complete slacker with my working out at the beginning of the week thanks to a St. Patty's Day party at our house on Saturday night, which inevitiably took me days to recover from.  Damn that keg of Dogfish Head.  So my brilliant self decided to make up for it at the end of the week, and now my legs are officially dead tired.  Here's my workout schedule from last week.

Sunday- recovering from Saturday night

Monday- still recovering

Tuesday - ?still recovering....or just lazy

Wednesday- run 4 miles with Mike and Daisy, and 1 hour body pump.  My half-ass attempt to stick with my training schedule went like this: 
Schedule: jog 15 minutes, then run 1 mile at "push it" pace, jog for 2 minutes; repeat speedy mile/recovery combo for total of 3 times, then jog 15 minutes. 
My actual workout looked like this:  Jog 5 minutes; fast mile/recovery combo x2 (we couldn't possibly drag our asses for a third fast mile), then jog until we reached our 4 mile goal.  Blah.  Not what I was hoping for.

Thursday - slackin' again

Friday- Run 5 miles with Mike and Daisy.  Again, couldn't maintain the schedule. 
Schedule: Jog 15 minutes, then run at the fastest pace you can maintain for 4 miles, then jog for 15 minutes
Actual: Jog 5 minutes, attempted to keep decent pace for 2 miles, then couldn't even trick myself into believing we were still keeping up any sort of "fast pace" anymore as I drug myself through the last 2+ miles.  My legs felt like lead and i was literally not sure if I could complete this 5 mile run.  What is wrong with me this week???  Let me just rant for a minute.  First of all, I like this training plan that I'm working with, but seriously, jog 15 min at the beginning and 15 min at the end?  Thats's a full half hour... of just warm up and cool down.  Puh-lease.  Not gonna happen.  It's hard enough for me to just get the workout in; I'm not about to throw in an extra half hour of warm up/cool down.  Which brings me to my next point....  Now I'm sore.  Lack of warm up/cool down, you say?  Don't get me started.  Moving on.


Saturday- Thought maybe I'd redeem myself and pound out a nice, strong 8 miler.  Never mind that I haven't run 8 miles in one clip in literally a year.  No problem, right?  Wroooong, oh so wrong.  My eight miles of misery looked something like this: 

Started out with Daisy in the neighborhood and all is well. 

About a mile and a half later we arrive at the Greenway where Daisy decides it's a free for all.  She's pulling me in every direction.  It's hot and she won't drink from my water bottle (P.S. coming from a girl who never carries a water bottle...Damn, those things get heavy when you're carrying them for 8 miles!). 

I decide I'm gonna let her get a drink from the creek. 

She notices that we're going in that direction and flies like a bat out of hell, which causes me to have to make a split second decision:  face plant into the creek or...let go of the leash.  Sigh, I picked the latter.

She proceeds to go tearing around with her leash flapping behind her in the creek/mud.  Does she come when I call her?  Of course not; this is all a fun game.  I'm not laughing.  In fact, I'm tempted to just keep running at this point and leave her to her games.  But alas, I call Mike in a rage telling him to come and get HIS dog, because she's a nuisance and an embarassment...and a muddy mess. 

So I manage to step on her leash as she's flying past me and grab her to start heading back to the beginning of the Greenway where Mike will pick her up. 

She conveniently picks this time to shake her mud all over me.  Thanks dog, that just added to the delightful feelings I have toward you at this moment. 

We head back, and once Mike is in view I promptly hand over our wet, muddy, piss ant of a dog and proceed on my way.  I am only 3.5 miles in at this point, mind you. 

As soon as Mike and Daisy are out of sight I have to run up a long, steep hill.  I huff and puff, and shuffle my way to the top of that hill (looking like an 80 year old lady at this point...and not even caring). 

Jog another few minutes, and once my Nike plus lady says I've completed 5 miles I stop and walk for a minute to have my Gu.  Oh, did I say a minute?  Oops, that was the plan, not reality.  Walked for a good 5 minutes while I ate my Gu and drank way too much water.  Yay me.  I did feel better after the Gu though.  Is it all in my head that those Gu things work?  Perhaps, but it helped nonetheless. 

So I powered through miles 6 and 7 ("powered through" with times of 10:10 and 10:30.  Ha! I told you it was rough!) 

Slugged out the last mile and I am done.  An hour and 35 minutes later.  What a joke. 

So there you have it.  My workout week.  A sad state of affairs if I do say so myself.  Blah.  Then yesterday I did an hour of body pump followed by an hour of zumba.  If only there was a video camera...but thank goodness there wasn't.  Me doing salsa, hip hop, etc, was a sight for sore eyes I'm sure.  But I did it with a friend and it was our first time, so we just had fun with it.  I would try zumba again.  It's pretty much just dancing around to fun music, and it's a different (albeit, amusing) way to get your cardio in. 

Now it's Monday, and my knees are screaming "Give us a break!!".  They are definitely sore, so I'm going to be smart and just rest and ice today.  That's hard to do when you have a "training plan" that you're trying to follow.  I'm one of those people that is do or die with the training plans.  I do it if I'm sick or tired or sore.  And I think after all these years I've finally learned that that is not the way to train.  I need to listen to my body and what my body is telling me.  Mine is politely telling me (or, like I said, screaming at me) to lay off the working out for a day.  So for once in my life, I'm going to listen.  Training plan be damned, my body has it's own plan!