Treadmill is a no go

[Day 21]

So I decided that swapping back and forth between the urg and the treadmill would be a pain, and I figured instead I would just do 5k of each thing and be done with it. I was little more aggressive on the urg today and was surprised that it was much harder than it felt yesterday. I don't really think I got my heart rate or breathing up very high yesterday, just kept it nice and smooth and comfortable, and today I was pulling a bit harder and it was actually a really great workout. The treadmill was a definite no though, I was really barely on it for like a minute before I could start to feel my leg getting unhappy so I just shut it down. I was on the wards shadowing in the morning and knew I was going to be on my feet a lot so I figured I couldn't afford to have my knee be irritated today. I think I'm going to just lay off the running this week and maybe see how things are doing next week. Ideally I think I want to not feel any pain when I push on that part of my knee before I test it out again, because I figure if I try to get back at it too early, I'll just end up aggravating it. Next spot on my calendar is Wednesday, but we'll see how the weekend plays out and take it from there.

I thought about doing something else for the remainder of the planned duration of my workout but I figured it would be nice just to come home and take care of some errands and work and whatever, so that's what I ended up doing. Here's the summary of my very short day!

Today's Workout: AM rowing (5k steady state, resistance of 7)
Summary:

• So I had to reset the machine halfway because the display paused for some reason, I have the numbers split because of that.
• 5075 m (3354/1721), 24:36 (16:21/8:15), 2:26.2-2:23.5 avg/500 m, 22-24 s/m

Hit Rate: 20/21 (95.2%)

Okay I need to like pay attention in class now.

Much love,

Jess

I really wish I worked harder.

[Day 6]

I'm having a rough day (following a rough night that I won't get into the details of) and it's not even 9 am. I want to be going at full throttle at all times and I have some semblance of an understanding that this isn't actually possible, but the reality of my life is that days like today happen where I know (on some level) that the right play is to give myself a day and focus on recovery. The problem is that I always feel terrible about these days, especially if they're changes to what had been a more rigorous plan. Adjusting harder days to easy days makes me feel terrible, even when I know it's the right thing to do. I always feel like I'm just choosing to be weak. Like if I pushed harder I could just get through this and it would be fine. I wish I was strong enough to just choose to do more. But I guess some days you're just supposed to do less. I dunno.

Anyways, all I did was some stretching/yoga and core work this morning. The core work was 2 rounds of 50 leg lifts (broken as 35/15 and 30/20), 50 wrist to knee sit ups, and 100 Russian twists. It wasn't much, but it was really all I was motivated to do. (This is the other problem with spontaneous changes to the plan: I end up not really doing much of anything because I didn't have a prepared workout laid out for me in advance.) I know I need to do less straight ab stuff and more functional core things but it's all stuff I really hate (read: planks) and I'm super unmotivated about all the maintenance work. I know it's important, I just have to get better about actually putting it into my schedule so I can't just continually blow it off like I tend to. I wrote some plank/core work into my post-run tomorrow, so hopefully I will actually do that.

All in all, I was on my yoga mat for like an hour, but realistically I was only doing things for maybe half of that. (I was also distracted by life drama, what can I say.) I'm going to try and fit some more stretching in in the evening as well because that actually made my body feel tons better. I'm not going to add or take away anything from the hit rate, I think taking it easy today was the right call to make, even if I'm not entirely happy about that. We'll get back at it tomorrow (planned double, treadmill run in the morning and trainer ride in the afternoon).

Much love,
Jess

THE. LAST. DAY.

This was a note I wrote from me to Henry (nominally, seeing as I didn't actually show him this note) whilst eating lunch at Adventure Bay with Coen today.

I think I really have to keep this here as a reminder to myself of the fact that I love going out and pushing myself and doing my best and sometimes exhaustion and stress and pressure get in the way of that and makes me lose sight of this. I need to try to hold onto this mentality when I'm in the midst of working hard because at the end of the day, it's important that these pursuits add to my life instead of take away from it.

Today was an easy easy warm up before the main event tomorrow:

Today's Workout: Easy 3-5 mi. run.
Summary: 3.17 mi, 29:27, 9:17 pace.
Pace splits by mile: 9:25, 9:18, 9:13, 8:55.
Hit rate: 18/20 (90%)

I was happy with the pace even though it felt a little more strenuous than I think it realistically should have. I'm fairly happy with what food intake looked like today given that I had to eat out for a lot of the day just because of the way timing/life worked out (noodles for dinner = big plus) and I've been loading up on potassium Vitamin Water (fruit punch) the past few days and am having a Nuun right now. Tomorrow morning I'll have another Vitamin Water and pocket some Nuun in case I decide I want it. The plan will be an early breakfast at Timmy's (bagel carbs!) and either one or two gels in the lead up to the run (TBD depending on what my fluid intake looks like and how I feel). I'm really pumped!

In other news, it's been really interesting to think about how I've been feeling about racing in the lead up to this race. Here are the three big things:

(1) I'm really inexperienced at running races still. With swimming, I know my pre-race routine down to the dot in terms of how early I like to wake up, what I like to eat, what I do for general warm up and pre-race warm down and cool down, how to rest between events, and exactly how my events should feel as I'm swimming them. I have so much experience that I can turn my brain off the entire day basically and autopilot will take care of it. I don't have that with running yet, so I'm still learning and it feels like there's a lot of uncertainty and nerves. That'll get worked out with experience though, so I just have to keep racing until the routines become familiar.

(2) Related to me being inexperienced is that I somehow have this sense that I need to rely on things like diligently watching my pace in order to run the best possible race. But in swimming I've never really thought about my splits while racing. The focus is always on just racing my best possible race. Because unless I execute close to perfectly, I don't have a chance at PBs. I think I need to develop this mentality with running and triathlon races as well. It's not about splits or whatever, it's about executing on controllables like technique and moderating effort and rest/preparation, etc. If a PB falls out of that, great. If it doesn't, then it wasn't going to just because I was looking at my watch the entire time. PB races depend on the best possible execution, and there is much more to that than what my splits are going to look like tomorrow. I'm going to try my best to just focus on executing and not worry too much about what time drops out of that execution.

(3) It's nice to know that this race is just a stepping stone in the grand scheme of my training. I guess everything that I do between now and what will hopefully be USAT Collegiate Club Nationals in the spring is really just a stepping stone. The races in September will carry some real weight though, whereas this one really is almost just a hard tune-up training session. The September races are the first real tests of how well I can handle the Olympic distance. This race is almost like just a high intensity long run that's meant to help me develop my running in the lead up to the later triathlons. The result in and of itself doesn't matter to me as much as it usually would because either I will PB and be ecstatic or I won't and it will still have been a really meaningful part of my training and building up towards being able to run the best 10k I can at the end of what I know will be a tough event for me distance-wise. It's exciting to run a race with a more casual mentality.

Another quick note: I didn't sleep as well as I would have liked last night, but I did take a nap in the middle of the day today and plan on going to bed in about 15 minutes so I should have lots of ZZZs in the bag for tomorrow. Going to go lay everything out and stretch briefly and brush my teeth and get all set up and ready to go. Wish me luck! (Also: YAY 90% HIT RATE!)

Much love,
Jess