HELLO....Lazy!!!

Wow. I didn't do much of anything this past weekend. The two previous weekends had been filled with traveling and it's hard with our weekly schedule the way it is to not have a chance to refill our tanks. We more than made up for that with this past weekend.

And I have to say...it was awesome. I do like being busy, but every once in awhile, it's nice to just enjoy our apartment and relax.

This weekend we also wanted to get in some training for the GMR that's coming up in early June. I have never done any kind of relay, or any kind of running that is back to back. I usually do all my running at about the same time so I at least have about a 24 hour recovery time. So after we realized that we didn't want to get up early on Saturday morning we decided to try the following :

6 miles Saturday evening
6 miles early Sunday morning
6 miles Sunday afternoon.

giving us 18 miles total for the weekend, but bunched up a little different than usual.

On Saturday we slept it and I made a big breakfast which is always a treat. Before the Cubs started we walked over to a Chicago Public Library branch that is only about two blocks away from us. It's super tiny, but the librarians seemed friendly enough and I actually liked it better that the bigger and newer Bucktown branch. The Bucktown branch is nice, but the entire first floor is kids books and to get to the adult fiction books, you have to go upstairs and into the quiet reading room which I think is kind of weird. There are a couple books that I found that are in the CPL system, but not at this close branch so next time I go there I am going to try and see if I can have them sent to the one by us. Then it doesn't matter how many books they have. We'll see how that goes.

After a dazzling Cubs win, we headed out for our 6 mile run. And what the ass. I don't understand why I felt so crappy. Just sluggish and blech feeling. My mind was not agreeing with my legs and we came in at 53:14 or 8:52 min/mile. I didn't take Garmin on these runs, I just ran the exact same route all three times so I could have a comparison of times that didn't depend on GPS signal. I had done this 6 mile run many times last month and so I just followed the same route. I think this was slow because Saturday is usually our recovery day and maybe our bodies were used to that kind of running instead of a bit faster.

We had an evening of...you guessed it....laziness (by the way I think that laziness is directly proportional to how much money you have...and given that we are in a financial nightmare...kinda...we tend to be lazier at the end of the month) and watching some episodes of House that we had recorded on DVR. The guy that plays Dr. House, by the way, is SUPER British, I found some interviews with him on YouTube and it was very disorienting to hear him being all proper and well...I don't know British I guess. He also wrote a book back in 1993 or so (before he was famous) called The Gun Seller and it has pretty good reviews on Amazon so I am going to try and find it via CPL and give it a go.

Sunday morning we got up at 5:30 and were out running by 6:15 or so. The first three miles were again annoyingly slow coming in at over 9min/mile. Even without Garmin I knew were the 3 mile mark was and I was surprised that it was slower than expected. Even crazier however for this run was the fact that we finished in 51:06...averaging 8:31 min/mile meaning that the last three miles must have averaged out to about 8 min/mile. I didn't feel like we were running that fast though so I was happy to see such a nice improvement on the second half of the run.

We got back home at 7:30 or so in the morning....which is hilarious. Normally I wouldn't have even been out of bed yet. I felt like making some pancakes, but I didn't want to buy a box of Bisquick, so I found a recipe online and made my own. I added some blueberries to them and we had a nice blueberry pancake& bacon breakfast. I was excited to find that recipe because we should usually have all the stuff in the house for those pancakes no need to spend extra cash on boxes of premade mix. We spent the rest of the morning watching The Prestige, which if you haven't seen it, is a fantastic movie! Creepy creepy for sure though.

After the Cubs game (I *hate* A.J. Pierzynksi, he just looks like that kid that beat everyone up on the playground when they were little....by the way I *heart* Michael Barrett and loved that he landed that punch last year :-) ) we did our last set of 6 miles. I couldn't believe it when we came in at 49:34. That's averaging like 8:15 min/mile. I felt really good for this last 6 miles and I am way more confident about the GMR relay now.

So now we head dangerously close to marathon training time. The slight problem is that the first week of marathon training, is the same week as the GMR. So I am going to do week one the week before, try and do about the same number of mileage during the GMR week, then week two the week after as it should have been. I would also like the first week of marathon training to be a drop back week. So we are doing 37 miles this week and then will be able to drop back to 32 miles for the first week of training. So it's looking something like this

May 21 - May 27 : 37 miles, including 12 mile long run on Sunday
May 28- June 3 : 32 miles, first week of Pfitz, deleting midweek recovery run to drop mileage
June 4- June 10 : Week of GMR, 17.7 miles GRM + 21 miles other (might cut this down a bit)
June 11 - June 17 : 36 miles, 2nd week of Pfitz.

The toughness on the schedule this week is a LT run planned for tomorrow with 6 miles, with 3 at LT pace. I like to run to music for these because I find them difficult (I don't use music for any other run) and I worked out a playlist last night. I try and have slower songs planned for the time that is planned to be warm up miles, then fast get your legs moving songs for the next three, and then slow slow songs planned for the last mile. I usually over estimate though and have more music than running time...but that's why the skip button is so nice.

I am going to work from home a few days this week since my advisor is at a conference in Italy this week. It should be a nice change of pace and I'm looking forward to sleeping in a bit for a few days.

Well here we go with another Monday....and I do have a nice long list of to dos to get through.