Month: August 2010

So this is what I’m thinking I’ve been wrestling with of late: Burnout. I’ve had acting work, a couple of vacations, apartment reorganization, general semantics boxes representing endless hours of work, extreme summer heat, and life going on. It’s been so much that I simply got burned out with all of the goal achievement. Yesterday was part of regrouping, and so was today. Instead of going more than 8 miles, I decided that it’s burnout that I need to guard against, so I did one loop. I’m happy. It was 78 and it felt a bit more humid than I realized (about 53%), and I did the loop in 46:25. That’s 7:18s. I wonder what my pace would be if it were cooler or less humid. Here are today’s deets:

Since yesterday’s long run, I felt the expected bodily tiredness getting out of bed this morning but it was nothing daunting. I had pasta for dinner last night (“homemade”), in hopes of helping with my glycogen stores. I also ate generally better yesterday, and I hope to do the same today. I took ArginMax before bed last night, and this morning I had ArginMax again with quercetin. Chocolate milk was my post-run drink, plus Gatorade and coconut water. Eggs and a bagel for breakfast.

I want to get better. I must stay focused throughout my day.

I just got back from a weekend trip to North Carolina wherein I didn’t do any running but I did traverse a spread-out zoo and Tanglewood Park in the heat. I missed my long run, so this morning I put it in. I set out to do 22 miles but I couldn’t do more than 17.52, which I’m telling myself is OK. I am deciding my recent mindset hasn’t been constructive, and I want to have a better mindset as I move forward toward this year’s marathon goals.

For this run, my mind stayed on the goal of 22 miles though my body started to deteriorate so I wasn’t able to support that goal. I did, however, get in two whole loops and one sans loop. While not 22, it’s still a long run.

Injurywise, in my left foot I felt in the big toe joint some discomfort in the last few miles that made me think about stress fractures. And I ran with a stitch in my right abs for quite a while. The temperature, though, made for pretty decent running for two loops at 75 and the last loop at 78 with rather low humidity around 40%. I got this run in before what is supposed to heat up to about 95 today.

In explaining the slow pace of 8:24s, I was pretty even for the first two loops, choosing to go a slow, steady pace. My pace increased in latter miles partially because I didn’t have Auto Resume on so it kept running when I stopped for water breaks sometimes lasting 30 seconds. I didn’t have pasta last night and I’d consumed a considerable amount of junklike food over the weekend so that may have made some kind of impact. Interestingly, I had a lot of salt build up on my arms after this run. I also lost 5 lbs, going from 175 lbs this morning before my run to 170 lbs after, with hydration.

Afterwards, I had some Naked Juice Protein Shake and an ice bath. I also ate some edamame.

I fell off training. It wasn’t pretty. I overwhelmed myself. Coming back from vacation, I was supposed to do a 15-miler. Instead, I rebelled. Granted, I had some other things in my schedule taking up my time, but I wasn’t running 8-milers or even 10Ks. I was doing squat. Today, I got back out.

It was raining. Not really drizzling, raining. The temperature was a nice 66 degrees despite what translated to 93% humidity, or maybe 100%. It was cloudy, but it was cool. Cool meant good running. Cool made me happy. Heck, rain made me happy.

I ended up with a somewhat decent time for my 6.31 miles: 45:58. I did 7:17s. At this time last year I was doing 6:53s … over 8.273 miles. So I’m behind. Which focuses me. I’ve had a lot of stuff going on, and my mind has been scattered. But I made some weekend progress and it looks as if I might be able to get focused. No, I gotta. If I wanna meet my goals, I gotta focus and focus hard. Look at every minute and see what I can do toward my goals.

Here are the deets from this morning’s run:

My heart got a pretty good workout today. It feels behind. I wanna take ArginMax again to see if it might help my blood pumping. We’ll see. Other than that, nothing much to report. Help me.