This week's workout lowdown

I have been remiss in blogging lately because my job has become crappily all-consuming.  I have been preparing for meetings, running meetings, angry about attending so many damn meetings, angry at people who are so entrenched in their own fixed mindsets that they can't see how they are damaging students, and staying up late writing and preparing an all-day in-service presentation for another school district which I was lucky enough to give on my birthday.  (The in-service wasn't crappy at all--I had a great time.  Staying up late the night before because I was having copier issues was the crappy part.)

It's been a little hectic, but my workouts have remained my priority and my sole source of stress relief.  Here is my exercise lowdown for the week:

• Monday was barbell day.
• Tuesday was a quality run workout, consisting of 6 x 800 meters at 10-K pace on the treadmill.  Treadmill Tuesdays are back, people!
• Wednesday I ran 5 easy miles, again on the treadmill.  The treadmill makes me run easy when I need to run easy. Plus, the TV in front of it works now, so I can plod away while being sucked away in the vapid void of what they call TV programming these days.
• Thursday was a 7 mile tempo run.  I ran the tempo portion of the run (5 miles) at about an 8:45 pace because my goal is not to go crazy on the speed work days and get injured like I have done in the past.  However, I didn't have to watch for things like this:

Thankfully this melted the day before; it's hard to keep pace when you're trying not to break yourself.

• Friday had me doing some easier weight training.  I actually did my favorite Jari Love DVD but skipped all the lower body parts.  This workout used to kill me, but yesterday I was feeling just fine during the workout. Love that I can see gains like that, and it only took a few years, lots of Cathe DVDs, and copious swear words.

On Saturday:

I was running a 5K  to celebrate my birthday weekend.  (I know, we runners are weird like that.)  It was a nice flat course through a small subdivision, and was held by a local park district that happened to be located an hour from my house.  Do you know how hard it is to find a race in the middle of January on the weekend of my birthday?  In case you were wondering, very hard, so getting up very early and driving an hour is my only option.  Thankfully this race had a 9 A.M. start time.

The weather was a little windy, but temperatures were in the 40s--you can't ask for better weather, really, for Illinois in mid-January.  I was running faster in that race than I have in a while (averaging an 8:16 pace because of a slow first mile), but I wasn't running all out because I knew I had 13 more miles to go after that.  Why?  Because when I woke up this morning it said, "Pace-16 miles" on the old marathon training schedule, so I ended up splitting those miles up between my race in the morning and my 13 mile run in the afternoon:

Like I've said before, I believe that you learn something from every run.  The learning gathered from this run was that my new running shoes sucked for long runs.  I bought some New Balance 750s the night before, and they felt good--really good--when I walked around in them in the store.  They even felt fabulous during the 5K, and my Achilles wasn't hurting at all after the race.  After my long run, however, my Achilles was screaming.  Thankfully, my oldest sis had already planned to take me to get a birthday massage, so we went to this massage place called World of Rainbow (really) to get the most awesome foot and leg massage I have ever had--and it helped immensely.  I'm thinking there just wasn't enough support in the New Balances for that long of a run.  Lesson learned: stick to my Mizuno Wave Riders.  

So, even though my week was crappy, my workout week was pretty good.  Let's hope that in the coming weeks I won't have to rely so heavily on my workouts to retain what's left of my sanity.