Rusty's Blog

I should have gotten another hour or two of sleep.

Never really a good blog begining when the subject is week 6’s wrapup session for c25k, is it? Not all that much I can do about it though, it’s a rough weekend for me. My niece graduates tomorrow afternoon, and I’m going to be doing a bit over 500 miles of driving to get there and back so that I can be available for SkyWarn on Monday. I won’t mention what I got for my niece for her graduation present, but I had to pick that up this morning, as well as make sure that the car was ready to go (oil change) do a recording of a radio net and helping someone check that they have access to the repeater system as well. I was up after work yesterday until after 11 am today, woke up at just after 3:00 pm and got ready to perform my session.

I could blame the wind, or just being tired. but I don’t know if that’s quite right. In any case it doesn’t really matter why I didn’t get quite as much running done as I would like. I just have to keep at it.

I did get to my turn around point, 12-13 minutes out, but the return was not as well done. I would say that I ran a bit over half the time.

I’m not going to get overly concerned with that unless I don’t see an improvement on Monday morning. It doesn’t matter at this point if I try to ‘re-run’ the session or not, as all of week 7 is the same routine as the final session of week 6. A brisk 5 min walk, followed by a 25 min run. I have great confidence that I will be completing that, and moving on to 28 min, and 30 min sessions the next two weeks. I may not be running a full 5k at that point, but I’ll be able to start from there and start building my speed over the weeks to come.

With all that I have to do this weekend, I really could have used a couple more hours of sleep…

Well, as you can probably tell by the title, I’m not really satisfied with my results today. I can come up with a number of plausable reasons, or combinations of reasons, but it comes down to either re-do this week, or redo today’s run this weekend.

As I’ve indicated before, I work nights, and last night was no exception. So when I ran this morning I had come off of a 12 hour shift, along with about a 1 hour bus ride each way. On top of that, I did not sleep well yesterday. I think I was up some 5 times in the 7 hours I was planning on sleeping. So when I went to run this morningI was not in the best condition. That said, I had hoped to do better than I did. I would say that I don’t think I did as well today as I did Wednesdayh, but I could be wrong.

I started out well enough. I got further during my warm up walk than I had the last time I too anything like this route. Once I started running I was going along well enough, but at about 7 and a half minutes I had to recover. I walked for about a minute, then got back going again. 2 and a half minutes later I needed to recover some more. This time I think I walked for a minute and a half. Then I got back to running. I’m a bit fuzy on how long I ran this time. I wasn’t tracking the intervals this time very well, but I did take another walking break and got to running with about four and a half minutes left, and stuck to it till the end of the 20 minute interval. So worst case I walked about 5 min of the 20, and best case I walked about 4 minutes.

My plan at the moment is to try to get a good night’s sleep Saturday night, and make another attempt Sunday morning. If that works, I’m going to roll Week 6 a day back and start Tuesday morning. I’ll take to running before I go to work in the evening. Presumably I will get a good day’s sleep on Thursday and Saturday. Then I’ll continue on with Week 7 the following Monday.

This schedule presents some problems for me participating in the 5K in June, as if I didn’t have enough problems with that, but I’m hoping that by then I will be in much better condition, and should be able to do a run like this, or longer, OK, quite a bit longer. It may not be ‘with ease’ and I’m not planning on setting any records in any case, but we’ll see what things look like in a week or so.

I suspect that one thing that will happen this weekend, is that I will force myself through a affine withdrawl headache. I suspect that is one of the things that kept waking me up yesterday.