Gradually upping the mileage, & starting to mix in some faster miles here & there with just four weeks left to go until our 2024 season opener! (And, with only the *occasional* monkey wrench thrown in by the universe, one can only assume to keep us on our toes. 🤦🏻♀️😬)
~*~*~ 🎡 🎡 Kaiser Permanente Half Week 9 of 13 🎡 🎡 ~*~*~
Grand Total: 34 miles
🐌 Easy: 26 miles
🏃🏻♀️ Moderate: 8 miles
⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 76.5% vs. 23.5%
Monday 1/1: Rest. Much needed after Sunday's trail half marathon!
Tuesday 1/2: a.m. strength + p.m. 4 easy. Definitely still tired & sore so taking it super easy both in the gym & on the run.
Wednesday 1/3: 8 easy Spend the evening in the kitty ER 😭. At about 4:30pm I was literally about to head out the door for a run when I heard Don cursing in the kitchen. Apparently in just a couple of minutes, our cat Bastet had managed to orally dismantle a new cat toy and swallow the foot of bungie cord connecting the toy part to the wand. We were so lucky that we knew it happened and got her to the animal hospital less than twenty minutes after it happened as swallowing things like string, thread, yarn, etc. ("linear foreign bodies") can be fatal for cats. Long story short, they were able to retrieve the cord from her stomach via endoscopy with no complications, and she was back home and seemed just fine (other than being a little wobbly from the anesthesia) by 10:00pm. We spent the rest of the night having an adrenaline hangover and feeling incredibly lucky that we live so close to an emergency clinic & that there was an endoscopy specialist there on call.
Sweet girl doing just fine the next morning, with her sad little shaved leg from the IV 😭
Thursday 1/4: 2.5 warm up, 3 x 1.5 miles @ tempo effort / 2:30 jog, 2.5 cool down = 10 total. I'd been thinking I was over being sick and even reasonably recovered from Sunday's trail half, but this run made me think maybe not. I felt pretty good starting the first interval at ~7:40-7:45 pace, but even after just that one interval I really struggled to jog for a full 2:30 minutes so it was more like 0:30 jog, walk a bit, 0:30 jog, walk a bit, and so on. Definitely closer to like 5:00 minutes lapsed before I started the second interval lol. I felt significantly more tired on the second interval, with my pace closer to 8:00 pace, then low/mid 7:50ish for the last one. I just felt like I couldn't really catch my breath and my legs were struggling to move much faster than a brisk trot. I'm pretty sure it's related to just having been sick and then running the trail half & I'm sure I'll feel back to normal soon.
I don't have a lot of running-related pictures this week so please enjoy this one from a crab dinner we had with friends Thursday night after I got home, featuring this delicious Dao white wine, which I will absolutely purchase again.
Friday 1/5: 6 easy, though it didn't feel that easy. I didn't really feel like I'd recovered from the workout the day before, so again I tried to take this really easy (though it still didn't feel super easy)
Saturday 1/6: 14 long. Rest. I felt like if I tried to make this run happen in spite of how exhausted I was feeling, I was only likely to dig myself into a deeper hole. Instead I spent it curled up on the couch under a fuzzy blanket with a mug of tea while it rained, which tbh did not suck. 🥰
Sunday 1/7: 14 long (w/ miles 11-13 faster). Feeling much better on Sunday! I think putting this run off a day was definitely the best choice.
🎧In my ears this week:🎧
- The Magus by John Fowler. First audiobook of the new year! Mannnn this book is a strange one. In 1950s Britain, a disaffected and aimless young man takes up with an Australian girl, then breaks up with her when things get too serious. Soon after he pursues a job teaching English at a boys' school on the Greek island of Phraxos, where he meets the enigmatic and eccentric millionaire Maurice Conchis, who may or may not have been a nazi collaborator in the second world war and who is soon engaging our young protagonist in what I can only describe as a kind of dreamy LARP involving a pretty girl who is first introduced (impossibly) as Conchis's young lover from back in 1915 and also a lot of Greek mythology cosplay. It only gets more bizarre from there!
- Nobody Asked Us with Des & Kara: The Trials Are Hard S**t.. Nothing is as comforting on a run as listening to Kara & Des shoot the shit. In this one they talked about the upcoming Olympic marathon trials.
- Reef Road by Deborah Goodrich Royce. This book opens with a group of kids finding a severed man's hand washed up on on the beach off of the fancy Palm Beach neighborhood of Reef Road during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. From there, we're treated to two alternating stories: the life story of a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend, and the story of a panicked Reef Road wife whose Argentinean husband has taken their children back to his home country without her permission. Over the course of the book, we learn how all three stories are related and what it means for the different characters.
No comments:
Post a Comment