At Least It's Over

Well, I'm glad that's over. Last week just turned into a total waste of a week running wise. I totaled 47 miles and none of them were anything to write home about. I wish I could say I was nursing an injury or tapering for a race, but I have nothing really to blame it on except for my own laziness. I got into a bad rhythm to start the week and never really got the ship righted. I'm almost embarrassed to put my week down, but here it is:

Mon: 8 Miles 6:20 pace
Tues: Off
Wed: 12 miles
Thur: 7 miles w/ 20 min @ 5:45 pace
Fri: 10 miles easy
Sat: Off
Sun: 10 miles easy
47 miles total

I've developed a bad habit over the past few months where I have been relying on getting in the bulk of my mileage during my lunch break at work. While this has been working out OK for the most part, it definitely is not without problems.

First of all, when you factor in changing and showering time, most of my runs don't really fit into the generally accepted hour lunch. However, for the most part, my work is pretty flexible with things so I come in a little earlier than everyone and everyone seems to just look the other way if I take an extra 15-20 minutes during lunch (OK, maybe a little more than that on some occasions). The second problem, is that stuff comes up. I wrote about this last year, but I'll just reiterate it one more time. For me, the only time I can guarantee to get a run in is if I do it first thing in the morning. If I count on running at lunch, things came come up that will cause me to miss it. If I count on running when I get home from work, I have to wait until the kids are in bed, which usually is around 8:30 and that's just a lot of time to talk myself out of running. So the morning's are the time to do it. Finally, it gets hot at noon during the summer in Chicago. Not only does this make the run unpleasant, it also makes it much harder to accomplish what you're trying to do for the day. It's much harder to go sustain LT pace when the temps are in the 90's as opposed to the 60's and 70's that you deal with in the morning.

So it's time to rededicate myself to the morning routine. I started getting into the lunchtime habit, because Ryan, our 9 month old son, was waking up every morning around 5:30 - 6 which is right around the time that I would usually be heading out the door to run. So the choice was either run anyway, and let my wife deal with the baby, or give her an hour break and put off the run until the afternoon. I usually chose the latter. However, now that Ryan is finally sleeping somewhat consistently until about 7AM each morning, I feel a little less guilty about not being around if/when he wakes up.

So with 8 weeks until Chicago, I think it's time to switch things up and go back to what I know works…morning running. Hopefully, this will result in more consistent, quality runs. I'm not going to totally abandon my lunchtime runs, but hopefully these will be only shorter recovery runs. The work will happen in the morning. Things started out OK this morning but I'll leave that for another post. See, I want to bury this week as quickly as possible, and I think the best way to do that is to make this it's own post, and then later today I'll write about today's stuff. Yeah, it's cheap, but it's my blog, my rules.