26.2 Miles Equals A Road Trip By Foot - Part 2

Week 4 of training hasn't gotten any better, I'm exhausted during the day. I drank so much coffee and Mountain Dew, I think I dyed my insides. My gym experiences are getting better, I have the eye candy twins to view on Thursday mornings. I made some "after workout, let's hurry and get ready for work" friends in the locker room. My long run this week was only for 3 miles, which I ended up doing on the treadmill because it was raining and lightning outside. The hail was so heavy by my house, it looked like it had snowed.

On Sunday, I decided to take Tiger with me on my recovery walk. He was so excited. As we started up the street, he was trying to mark his spot on everything. I finally stopped allowing him to make his territorial markings. We walked through a part of the neighborhood, to HS Road to PR Road and back home. Tiger was wiped out, he slept all night. The walk gave my legs a chance to feel slow movement, I got some of the kinks out. My left hamstring is still really tight. I have to do better with my stretching and make time to attend hot yoga classes.

Week 5, I started the Monday off pretty good because it was my FWA (Flexible Work Arrangement) day off work. But by Wednesday, I could not get out of bed, so I didn't. This week several women either made post about the squat challenge or asked me to participate. I do not think so, but I changed my mind. I'm playing catch-up since the challenge started April 1. 50 squats a day for the remainder of 2013. I also added 5 MOL (Movements of Love) which is 125 crunches a day. I also changed my wake-up time to 4 am, since it takes me about 15 minutes to actually wake up. Hopefully, this will help me make it to the gym right at 5 am, instead of 5:15. I'm really loving my rest day Friday.

I also decided this week to change my running pattern to 3:1 intervals. The 5:1 and 4:1 intervals were hard for me to recovery by the next interval. I felt a lot better and I was able to do my pace run at 10:54 per mile. My goal is to get back to a 10 minute mile or less by September. I also decided to change my 30 minute runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays to 3 mile runs. I realized I will need to stop helping other people pace during my running events and try to keep up with faster runners.

Week 6 began with menstrual cramps and the usual monthly nauseous. I wasn't able to do anything on Monday morning. By Monday evening I was fine, but I had the Grands with me. I had them complete the squats, crunches and some push-ups with me. I wore them out and they were sleep within 10 minutes. I made up for missing the bike on Monday on Wednesday along with the Elliptical and upper body weight training. When I say I was exhausted afterwards, that's an understatement. On Wednesday night, I stayed up too late doing some Spring cleaning and couldn't wake up Thursday morning. To make myself stay on track, I worked out in the evening. Gold's Gym was super crowded, not like in the early mornings. I was able to drop my pace to 10:34. And yet again, my energy level was high and I couldn't sleep which made for a difficult Friday, I fell asleep in the breakroom.

Now I sit here on a Friday night, in bed, resting for my Saturday long run. I swapped this week's distance of 3 miles with last week's distance of 7.5 miles. I wasn't able to run last weekend because I had the writing bug Friday night and stayed up to 2 am. I had planned to run later in the day after Chuckie's pageant and getting my hair braided, but my head was hurting so bad, the wind irritated it. I need to figure out how to incorporate hot yoga into my schedule after my long runs on Saturdays, add pole exercise and magic mile training one day out the week. And I might not get my Sunday recovery walk in because I will be cheering for the BGR ladies as they cross the finish line at the Big D Marathon, Half Marathon and 5K. The Big D was the first half event I participated in, it started my love for the half distance.