The Little Engine That Could

6 mile run, 22 mile ride

I'm trying to get back in the game. It's only for another few weeks. But it's really hard to stay motivated. I'm tired. I want to be lazy. But I can hang in there for another few weeks.

I ran at lunch today and was still a bit tired from Sunday. My main set was 8x100 striders, 2 miles of Z4 with 4:00 recovery walk, and finally .5 miles Z4 with 2:00 recovery walk. It seemed pretty warm and definitely humid. What's up with this humidity? I thought I left all of that behind. Anyhow, I took it pretty easy on the striders and probably got up to high Z3. It's just too short of a distance for me to really get my HR up there. The hardest part of the striders was keeping track of how many I had done. I think I did 8...

I think because I was feeling so tired, I didn't overthink the Z4 set. I certainly wasn't looking forward to it, but I wasn't dreading it either. I started at a good pace and didn't go out to hard. In fact, throughout the first half mile or so, my HR was frequently dropping back into Z3. Towards the end my HR was getting a little high and I had no problem slowing it down. I wasn't going for time. It was hot and I was tired, so I was just going to stick to the plan. I finished the 2 miles and enjoyed my 4 min recovery walk. The problem was that it was really hard to get started again. My legs felt like they were done and it was quite a struggle to get everything going again. But I made it through and finished the workout. Success. And I was quite surprised with my times - 7:50 pace for the 2 mile bit and just under 7 for the half mile. Not sure where that came from.

I got home with the plan of riding. Matt had said he would ride with me so it didn't seem like it would be that hard. But I got home and we took the dogs for a quick walk and neither of us really wanted to go. We started talking about how nice it would be to have a Computrainer right now. The thought of leaving the house just seemed ridiculously hard. And Matt wasn't making it any easier. Despite wanting to, I couldn't give in. We got dressed and headed outside. Once we got started it wasn't nearly that bad. Getting started is always the hardest part. We did a quick out and back on 36 to get in some rollers. I was supposed to do a steep hill, but skipped it since my hamstring was pretty sore after the run. I figured the rollers would let me still get in a decent workout and wouldn't aggravate my hamstring too much. I ended up doing about 30 minutes in Z3/Z4 and tried to just spin my way through the rest. In the end, I was glad I got on the bike, but it was an even better feeling to get home.

Only a few more weeks. I can hang in there.