fell a bit behind

I don’t imagine there are throngs of people clicking refresh on this blog everyday (in fact, the stats page says it’s gotten a whole THREE views since inception!), but I still feel guilty that it’s been so long since my last post.

I made some poor choices with my school work and outside obligations a couple weeks ago, and fell terribly behind. I think I’m just about done cleaning up the mess that was last weekend. I’ve made a vow to myself that I will do a better job of managing my workload. My goal is to try and spread it out more evenly; I currently use a “long-intense-homework-sessions-on-the-weekends” strategy that is kind of painful. My hope is that by doing some stuff during the week, I can reduce stress. We’ll see.

In other news, my last Sunday long run felt GREAT! It was a new distance pr for me, at eleven miles. I felt great and finished in about eighty minutes! I was hoping to run around 8-9:00 per mile, so coming in at ~7:20 was a pleasant shock. I had a couple days of acute knee pain last week when running, but didn’t feel a thing on Sunday’s run. Hopefully it was a temporary issue!

This morning was the second of my new speed training days. Hills this morning. We certainly have a lot of them around here, and they definitely took the juice out of my quads and hammies

One other random update: I’ve had great vision for most of life. Over the past couple months, I’ve noticed the blackboard has become a bit tougher to read. So, I finally went to the optometrist this morning, and turns out I’m near-sighted in one eye and have a mild astigmatism in both! So much for that streak, eh? After a grueling session of the “Do these frames look good on me?” game, I made my choice and come Friday, I’ll have an extra set of eyes. Apparently it’s a pretty mild prescription in the grand scheme of things, and hey, if I can actually read my profs’ handwriting now, count me in!

More frequent updates will ensue, I promise. For now, it’s time to get some more work done.

a day late

I’m not yet sure what the frequency of these posts will be; my guess is somewhere between once a day and once every other day. Nevertheless, I have to write post facto about yesterday because it was quite a memorable run.

First of all, I think I hit every stoplight red over the entire six miles. While it’s occasionally nice to get the minute of rest, it’s frustrating to have to stop every minute for 40-someodd minutes and wait for the little white/green man to tell me it’s okay to cross.

Second, there are only a few things that can actually stop me from running. Extreme pain is the obvious one, but a lesser-thought-of example is having to go to the bathroom. It’s really quite incredible how quickly having to go to the bathroom (either #1 or #2) can steal away your ability to run. If it escalates to a near-emergency, you have no choice but to divert all your energy toward keeping everything inside. This makes it quite difficult to move your legs fast.

Yesterday was one of the closest near-emergencies I’ve ever experienced. Luckily for me, I happened to be running along the edge of campus when I realized I couldn’t go any further. I ran into the first building that looked like it might be open and -thankfully- found the bathroom in time.

That’s the second reason yesterday was memorable. Almost a disaster, but memorable nevertheless.

Today’s run was pretty uneventful… it was a little bit slower than the last few, but I’m also feeling quite a bit tired/sore. I think the transition to this new program is hitting me pretty hard (an extra day of running each week, and longer distances). Hopefully my body will settle in soon and it’ll be back to business.