Friday, July 10, 2009

My brain took a break this morning + Foto Friday

This morning sucked. Which sucks, BUT that means I got my crappy run out of the way for this training schedule, right? Amen. I had 5 miles to do at a recovery/easy pace and for once, I didn't feel like going a lick faster. That speed workout yesterday took it out of me. Phew.
But let me back up a bit. I hate people who hit the snooze button. Let me rephrase that, I hate people who hit the snooze button causing me to wake up repeatedly when I would much rather be sleeping. In college, all my roommates that were avid "snoozers" had kicked the habit about a month in to living with me. The wrath of a tired Jeri can cause intense transformations, I guess. Taylor's alarm goes off at 4:30am, which would be fine if he got out of bed at 4:30am, but he doesn't. He lays there until 5ish hitting snooze over and over again. I like to stay in bed while he's getting ready for work, allowing me almost an extra hour of sleep, genius. EXCEPT that he keeps hitting the damn snooze button, causing me to not fall back asleep at all, and be crabby.
When I finally got out of bed, I didn't want to run, but I knew I was too awake to go back to sleep. After talking myself out of not running, I finally got ready, only to find that I had left my iPod at home. Grr. Strike 2 Friday morning, seriously, you're on my poop list.

Strike 3 came in the form of poor mathematical skills. To be honest, I'm actually really good at math (Toot toot. Yes, that's me tooting my own horn.) My job requires a lot of math, and I'm proud that I can do a good chunk of it in my head. However, these mathematical skills are not awake before 8am.

Since I'm pretty bored with the trails by Taylor's apartment, I decided to run to one side of the trail for a mile and back (2 miles) and then a mile and a half in the other direction and back (3 miles) for a grand total of 5 miles. The distance to the trails is .2 miles. I knew this, and was factoring this in to the distance, or so I thought. At one point I even thought that I needed to only run 1.3 miles in the 2nd direction to get the correct distance, but then argued with myself that I would end up .4 miles short. And who wants to run around an apartment parking lot for .4 miles? (You know you'd do it too, don't scoff at me.)

Wrong-o. I was right the first time. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until I was at the roughly one mile remaining marker, and still had almost a mile and a half left. The fact that my legs were DEAD, it was insanely humid, I was tired, crabby, still hating the snooze botton, and no iPod tunes to drown out my negativity did not help.

Oh well. I survived, and I'm probably stronger because of it. One this is for sure, I will be doing my tricky math the night BEFORE I plan these weirdo routes to avoid any extra length in the future.

The only good news to report, is that I actually hit my slow target pace, for the first time, um...ever. Also, my training log is back up on runnersworld PHEW, so I can report my stats. :) 5.25 miles in 51:06 for an avg. pace of 9:44. Target pace: 9:46. BOOM. :)

For Foto Friday, I thought I would include some sweet pics of the softball tourney of Tay's.


My arm looks way weird, but I think I'm trying to get my bev out of the photo. :)

The guy to my left is the one I raced after the bars back to our hotel. If you need a reminder, I won. :D

I really like this one of us. :) We struggle at cute pics, so I get excited when we succeed.

One of the other gf's who made the trip. Good times.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am the EXACT way when it comes to snooze buttons! I tell my husband often that it annoys the heck out of me and why cant he just get up?! LOL

Mica said...

I'm so glad that I'm not the only one who does wonky math while running. I used to do it ALL the time before I had my Garmin because I'd forget that there were 60 seconds in a minute or that 90 seconds =1.5 minutes. Whoops.

Glenn Jones said...

Ha ha! I know exactly how it goes! I'm an engineer by education, but I've given up on trying to calculate distances while I'm on the run. I *always* get it wrong!

Great pics! Thanks for sharing!

Anonymous said...

I hate alarm clocks in general - the days I wake up *right* before mine goes off? SO HAPPY.

hitting that target pace always feels good :) at least the run was long-er And "easy"