All I do is sleep

[Day 153]

Things accomplished today: Woke up, went to practice, came home, ate breakfast, promptly fell back into bed and just woke up again. Good job Jess lol. Doubled up yesterday, so here's the summary from yesterday and today!

Yesterday's PM Workout: Easy run, 4 mi
Summary: 4.34 mi, 42:00, 9:40 pace, 176 spm
Pace splits by mile: 10:05, 9:29, 9:53, 9:41, 8:21
Hit Rate: 18/23 (78.2%)

This was way harder than I thought it was going to be. My legs just didn't feel with it, it was a struggle for most of the way until we did a little pick up push at the end of the run. Henry pretty much pulled me the entire time. I know he has a much easier time running with me when I'm beside him but I spent a lot of the run tucked in behind him because my legs just didn't feel like they could go any faster. It was rough. But whatever, we got it done.

Today's AM Workout: CMSC practice, IM day
Summary:

• WU: 400 swim, 3 x 100 swim
• Main Set: I have no idea what any of the pace times were, I was just going last and leaving 5 off the person in front of me...
• 4 x 150 @ base + :10/:15, 100 fly/50 back, 100 back/50 breast, 100 breast/50 free, 100 free/50 fly
• 4 x 100 @ base + :10/:15, 50 build stroke/50 recovery choice
• 4 x 50 @ base + :10, 15 underwater fast/35 recovery choice
• (break)
• 4 x 150 rolling IM @ base + :10/:15 (pretty sure these were on the 2:50?)
• 4 x 100 @ base + :10/:15, 25 stroke FAST/25 recovery choice (pretty sure these were on the 1:50?)
• 4 x 50 @ base + :10, 35 moderate/15 sprint to the finish (pretty sure these were on the :55?)
• Did these 1-3 free as written, 4 easy b/c ran out of time lol
• Total Distance: 3100 LCM

Hit Rate: 19/24 (79.1%)

Swam a lane up today, was definitely the slowest in the lane and really hope I wasn't ticking my lane mates off by being too slow. They seemed fine though, they left on whatever interval they were doing and for the most part I made all the pace times so I wasn't really holding people up I don't think. And I wasn't THAT much slower than the second slowest person in the lane lol. I'm gonna try to stick it out and see how things go with swimming in this lane. I don't even know what base pace they were using, but whatever it was, it worked for today.

I'm feeling stronger in the pool than I was expecting to. I mean long course fly is non-trivial but I managed to make an okay go of it. I had some pain in my right shoulder today but it's because my hand tends to deviate outwards on my freestyle catch, especially when I'm breathing to the left. If I'm careful about my freestyle form, my shoulder holds up fine, so I guess it's a good thing that it nags at me when I swim poorly. 

My legs are less sore today than they were yesterday for sure, but they're still keeping me up at night and they're definitely far from perfect. Gonna try and take that tempo run today, I feel pretty confident in my ability to at least hit the HM pace intervals, but less sure about those 10k pace intervals...just gotta remind myself that how I feel is probably not gonna be an accurate reflection of what my body is capable of and I just have to not freak out and focus on holding good form and get after it even if it seems way harder than it should be. Hopefully things will go alright. I'll report back in the PM.

Much love,

Jess

Falling off the radar

[Day 151]

Exams will do that to you! I am pleased to report that I did in fact survive exam week. As of yet it is not officially known whether or not I actually passed all my exams, but I think I did fine, so I will just pretend that I did pass and that I am done with first year of med school for real. I came out to Boston on Thursday after my last exam and have been mostly adventuring with Henry. We went paddleboarding on Friday, hiking on Saturday, and ran stadiums with Tony and went to a movie yesterday! It's been good. I'm not gonna bother logging paddleboarding and hiking here, although it's up on Garmin Connect if anyone really cares. Here are the rest of the updates:

Yesterday's Workout: AM stadiums (~1/2 of Harvard stadium) + dryland circuit (5 rounds)
Summary: dryland reps

• Push ups: 19, 16, 14, 14, 15 (78 total)
• Sit ups: 14, 15, 14, 14, 14 (71 total)
• Dips: 24, 21, 22, 24, 23 (114 total)
• Squats: 21, 21, 21, 22, 22 (107 total)

Hit Rate: 15/20 (3 skipped exam week workouts; 75%)

Today's Workout: PM easy run, 4-5 mi

Summary: 4.88 mi, 43:38, 8:56 pace, 175 spm

Pace splits by mile: 9:21, 8:56, 8:45, 9:00, 8:34

Hit Rate: 16/21 (76.1%)

Notes/thoughts:

• I'm really sore today. Really hoping that fixes itself by tomorrow because I have a tough tempo run on the books (and I'm planning on swimming in the morning, so it'll also be a double day) and I'd like my legs to be functional for that. 
• The Harvard stadium is brutal. They were not kidding. I'm gonna try and work on that while I'm here, good way to try and keep some power/kick in my legs for the cycling while I'm away from my actual bike.
• For some reason my body was like, RUN FASTER RUN FASTER my entire run today. I was gonna go for an easy 9:30-10:00 paced run and the entire time my brain/heart/lungs were like ew this is too fast what are we doing but my body was like, nah this is good let's keep going. It was bizarre. But I guess that instinct is also exactly why I do what I do. Sometimes I think at the core of who I am is just this sort of crazy inexplicable desire to go faster all the time. I guess that's why I keep at it. 

So yup, master's swim practice in the AM tomorrow and a tempo run in the PM. Wish me luck! (And happier legs!)

Much love,

Jess

Run mileage is steadily climbing

[Day 43]

This week just really hasn't been swinging in my favour. My teammate who typically takes me to swim practice when she's also going in the mornings woke up with a migraine this morning and it obviously made more sense for her to go back to sleep and try to rest up that headache instead of go to the pool, so I didn't end up making it out to practice today (-1 on the hit rate!). I did, however, take the opportunity to go for a bit of a longer run and do some core stuff in the evening. Here's the rundown:

Today's Workout: Base run, 8 miles (clockwise lap of Forest Park + some extra bit)
Summary: 8.26 mi, 1:19:39, 9:39 pace average
Pace splits by mile: 9:36, 9:37, 9:52, 9:49, 9:53, 9:29, 9:38, 9:19, 9:24
Hit rate: 47/50 (94%)

Notes/thoughts: It felt pretty rough honestly but I just kept telling myself to take it mile by mile and stay under 10 minute mile pace for each and surprisingly I held up pretty well. I felt like after mile 4 or 5 I was getting stronger each mile which was nice. The fitness is there, it's just buried under a lot of fatigue lol. Gotta keep grinding! (:

Post-Run Core Workout:

• 2 min plank (was gonna try and do the rest of the series, but my shoulders are killing me from yesterday so we axed that...)
• 50/25 wrist-to-knee situps
• 40/20 leg lifts (w/ Henry pushing my legs at the top) + 10 negatives
• 25/25 V-situps
• 100 Russian twists

I'm really sore. Surprisingly my legs are particularly sore, like basically every muscle in them hurts, and honestly all they did was squat/deadlift so I dunno what the deal is. 2 hour trainer ride tomorrow, should be really terrible, but I'm going to do it during the US Marathon Olympic Trials so at least that will be motivation/entertainment. Gonna stay in and curl up and movie night with Henry now. Yay!

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