Thursday, August 30, 2007

CRANKY

Holy cow, lot’s to get to today.

I like the idea of mental toughness, grinding it out when things get really tough, crawling inside my brain and seeing what I’m made of. In reality I’d rather have some confidence boosting workouts leading up to my main race and then feel great on race day. With the marathon, either way there’s going to come a point when you’re going to be tested mentally. Ideally I’d like to postpone that as long as possible. Already having thoughts of a DNS is “probably” not the right mindset to be in at this point. So unless things change drastically in the next 5 weeks, October 7th is going to be a bitch.

Yesterday morning I was tired and talked myself out of a morning run. Luckily the kids were at Grandma’s, so I was able to run right after work. I headed to the local dirt track for a speed workout. I decided to do some 800s and it was really ugly. I managed a whopping 4 reps, ranging from 3:00 to 3:02 with a 400m jog. I can’t even run 6-minute pace for half a mile. Instead of continuously banging my head against the wall, I just pulled the plug and jogged home.

I’m trying to remain positive, but this workout definitely doesn’t help. I guess I’ll attribute it to being tired from Saturday’s MP workout – even though I’ve had 3 easy days since then.

I (almost) don’t even have the energy to talk about the idiot that showed up for his kid's football practice and plopped his chair into lane one. As I passed the chair the first time, he’s standing next to it. I thought maybe he didn’t see me, no big deal, now he'll move it. The next time I passed the chair, he’s sitting in it! Oh yeah, he was the first one there for the practice – no one else was there. It never fails when I do a workout on a track like this, someone is always sitting in lane one, walking back-and-forth without looking, or some kid is running alongside taunting me. Back to the prairie path from now on.

Speaking of idiots, I went out at lunch the other day. The road by my office is 4 lanes and the speed limit is about 30 – but people drive about 40 on it. Anyway, these two gals were running on the wrong side of the road with their backs to traffic and they were taking up half of the right-hand lane. I know there aren’t any sidewalks, but you can at least run on the correct side of the road – or even in the grass.

Since I’m cranky, how about the worst vanity plates ever; BZ MOM. Yes lady, you’re the only one who’s busy. How do you make it through the day? Let me pull over so you can quickly get where you need to go. Oh and watch out for the two gals running on the wrong side of the road.

For you bloggers that know anything about mastheads, I’m trying to figure out how to shrink one. If you go to my profile page and click on testing123456 – I’d like some advice on how to shrink that image down.

Finally, go check out Matt Gabrielson’s latest journal entry.

Quote of the day;

“I regained some confidence in my training and racing after a few decent races over there. I feel like more than ever that everything counts – EVERYTHING.” – Matt Gabrielson

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Five weeks, unsure. Perfect. Nothing to lose 5 week plan:

Sun = 10 easy
Mon = 5 easy
Tue = 8 x 800
Wed = 12 moderate
Thu = 5k hard
Fri = Off or easy
Sat = 20

Sun = 10 easy
Mon = 5 easy
Tue = 6 x 600
Wed = 12 moderate
Thu = 7 miles 15 sec. under pace
Fri = Off or easy
Sat = 16

Sun = 8 easy
Mon = 30 minutes
Tue = 8 x 800
Wed = 10 moderate
Thu = 8k hard
Fri = off or 30 min.
Sat = 13 easy

Sun = 8 easy
Mon = 30 minutes
Tue = 6 x 600
Wed = 6 easy
Thu = 5k hard
Fri = Off
Sat = 8 miles easy

Sun = 6 easy
Mon = off
Tue = 2 miles hard
Wed = 4 miles
Thu = Off
Fri = 2 miles
Sat = 1 mile

Arcane said...

It looks like you could just crop the right hand side of the picture and you'd lose just the one runner on the right hand side. There are a bunch of online photo editing sites that will allow you to crop pics.

Chad said...

Double, I have a 5 mile race tomorrow and a 25K next week, but I'll keep this post in mind. Thanks.

Fran, I think it's more than just cropping the image, we ended up shrinking the photo and it seemed to work.