Though it depends how you define “day.” I was actually half awake at 4am (is that day or night?), at which point I made the tragic error of squinting at my alarm clock and thinking, “Oh goody, perhaps Sweet Pea will actually make it the entire night without waking up.” Shortly after drifting back into a pleasant slumber, I was sharply interrupted by her cries. Gaaah! It took a while to get her settled back down, and once again, I was in the most deep of sleeps when my alarm went off at 6am. My body was melting into the mattress in the most comfortable way possible. My mind was telling me to get my lazy ass out of bed and hit the track, as this is my last serious week of training before I taper for the half marathon.
By 6:58, I had nursed the baby, gotten dressed, gotten my oatmeal down (after adding the water that is), and even taken a few sips of coffee. Confession: It was instant. We only keep it for baking and severe coffee emergencies, but I was short on time and by my estimation two nights in a row of horrendous sleep and an impending track workout certainly falls into the latter category.
As I walked out the door the sky was turning the most brilliant shades of dark blue, aqua, coral, pink, and red. I had on my new Lucy capris and surprisingly my legs felt great. I felt sure all of this bode well for a great workout. That was a cute idea.
Despite feeling good, once I got through the warm-up, I found my speed just wasn’t there. I planned to do 8×800. A few weeks ago, I was hitting 3:30’s or thereabouts, so I thought, to give myself a break due to poor sleep and still being sick, I would aim for 3:40’s. But I could barely do that. My times ranged from 3:42 to 3:49 except one random 800 that I did in 3:38- Some guy started out right behind me and I didn’t want him to have to go around me, which kept me extra motivated. I thought I might casually figure out a way to make it look like a coincidence if I were to follow him around the track for all my subsequent intervals, in hopes it might spur me to better times for the rest of the workout, but unfortunately after that one 800, I looked around and he was gone.
The bad news is I was slower than I anticipated and I ended up cutting the workout a bit short- down from 8×800 to 6×800, due to time constraints. I thought leaving myself an hour and 15 minutes to warm up, do the intervals, and cool down would be plenty, but I realized I was going to run of out time if I didn’t start my cooldown after the 6th interval.
The good news is I was able to stay pretty focused throughout the workout. Instead of letting the negative thoughts and judgements creep in- Why even complete this workout? You’re so slow. You might as well give up. This workout means you can’t possibly run fast in the race- I just focused on running and getting the workout done to the best of my ability. And I was pretty pleased with myself for not making excuses about still having a residual hacking cough (which sounds worse than it is) and being sleep deprived to keep me from getting out the door.
Once I was done with the workout, the real challenge of the day lay ahead… What to do with the day. With myself and Sweet Pea still not 100% healthy, I didn’t want to take her to playgroup, where every toy, tag, string, basically anything not nailed down gets into the hands and mouth of every little person in attendance. I didn’t want to infect anyone else, and to be quite honest, I can’t handle the idea of either of us getting sick again before we are fully over this cold.
There’s the grocery store, which Sweet Pea loves. Except we’ve been there like once a day every day for the past three days. There’s no more room left in our fridge. There’s Target, another of our faves, especially now that Sweet Pea is big enough to sit in the cart, except I didn’t feel like dropping $100 for no reason, and we all know that’s pretty much inevitable once you step inside.
We ended up meeting a friend for coffee, and then hitting Savers for my Halloween costume in between naps (Sweet Pea’s naps, not mine, regretfully).