Call Me Crazy

This morning we ran 3.88 miles and felt pretty good. Got up at 6:15am (like I promised myself I would) and were running by about 6:35 or so. It was cool out but a really beautiful morning. I took my ipod shuffle which used to have really really really awesome songs on. So I recently reloaded it with different songs only to find that it was replaced with very very very slow songs. Gotta do something about that as at the end of the run I had to keep pushing past songs. But all in all the run went really well.

So why can you call me crazy? Here's my new idea.

Jason and I live in Chicago but work in Batavia which is about an hour drive away. So we have two drivers so it's not all that bad, but it can get repetative after awhile. Last summer while training for the marathon Jason and I would ride our bikes downtown and take a train out to batavia, and then drive from there to work. It was great during the summer because our car didn't have air conditioning and it was a nice change of pace and we read on the train and so on. On the other hand, we were exhausted because were biking about 12 miles a day (which i know is not a lot) but then also training for the marathon. So we would get home and then have to run and it just got to be too much.

So here's my new idea. This keeps our cost of travel per week about the same, but changes things up a bit and lets us get training runs in simply. So here is the schedule

• Monday : Run in the AM, drive to work and back (as usual)
• Tuesday : Drive to work in AM take Metra downtown after work BUT RUN HOME FROM HERE!
• Wednesday : Take the el downtown, Metra to work, Metra back downtown RUN HOME
• Thursday : Take el downtown, metra to work, drive home. Perhaps an running off day
• Friday : Work from home and run whenever.
  

So its about 5.5 miles downtown from our apartment. So we get home and get our training run done AT THE SAME TIME. I love to multitask. Plus if we wanted to go farther than this distance we could always switch up the run and run along the lake or whatever instead of city streets.

We would only do this schedule if we weren't in some training program for a race. Right now that is looking like the rest of this month, December, January and then maybe June. We would have to be hyper organized with clothing and how do we get our books that we read on the train home in the afternoons while running (small backpack???) But we will start to try it out next week and see how it goes and we'll update the system on the blog.