glorious rest

can't believe my second week of rest is already here--feels like this IM training is going at warp speed.

which terrifies me. and excites me. but mostly terrifies me.

today i enjoyed my day off by: cleaning the house from top to bottom, prepping the house for a photographer (landlord is selling and getting ready to show. yay.), grocery shopping, taking the dog to the vet, and contacting every real estate agent alive in Boston to try and hunt down our next place to live.

sounds relaxing, right?

the rest of the week should be more restful.

oh. also. I GOT A NURSING JOB! weeeeeee. for those of you not in the know--i have been actively looking for a nursing job up here since November of 2011. that's right. almost a year and a half. i'll be working on a medical/surgical and oncology floor that also has a few inpatient hospice beds. it will be quite a change from my first job in trauma. i have always been interested in oncology, so i am pumped to start working. and also terrified. see a theme here?

i'm usually slightly (majorly) afraid of the things that are good for me in one way or another. nursing? terrified to start. IMLou? oh you bet i'm nervous. having a baby? HAHAHA i was SOOO scared. maybe because i'm afraid i won't be good enough? that i will fail and let myself and others down?

in the end, these things that terrify me, when i actually face them, end up being the best things i have ever done.

so, bring it, Emerson Hospital. i'm (mostly) ready for this! that goes for you too, IMLou!

week in workouts

another solid week in the books.

switched some things around (CTO had a thing this weekend, so we moved the long workouts to the days bebe is in daycare). here's how it went down:

M: rest day
Tu: 2hr spin + strength training
W: 10mi run
Th: 50 min dreadmill run...felt painfully slow after the previous day's long run + interval spin
F: nada! was supposed to swim, but lack of babysitting options forced it to Sat
Sa: aerobic spin + strength training + aerobic ladder swim
Su: anaerobic swim

here's looking forward to the upcoming rest week! happy training, y'all!

week in workouts

today was a gorgeous blue-sky-no-clouds-sunny-day in Beantown--a perfect day for a long run and St. Patty's Day people watching. (people up here are CRAY about St. Patty's Day. the women/girls take the dressing up to Halloween-level slutty-ness and the dudes are all hammered and angry. ok, the dudes always seem to be hammered and angry, but the slutty green clothes are a change.)

the long run was glorious. cold, but glorious. i even made a friend on the trail (we had the same lululemon gloves on and complained about freezer burn on the butt after long runs in the cold.) i managed to run today's 9mi an average of 15sec/mi faster than last week, and i thought i was doing well last week! followed it up with a 1mi fast walk aka "walk with a purpose" to simulate the probable walking i'll be doing on IM race day.

though this week was good in training, it wasn't so particularly awesome personally, so i'm not sad to see it go.

here's what the week in workouts looked like:

M: rest day
Tu: 1:15 aerobic spin + strength training
W: anaerobic swim with muscle-y/splashy fast ladies
Th: anaerobic spin (3/5 3 min @ very hard intensity VHI, 2 min recovery main set) + frozen hill repeats
F: looong aerobic swim ladder thingie
Sa: 2hr spin + strength training
Su: 9mi run

the kidlet starts daycare next week, so hopefully it will be a little easier and less stressful to fit the workouts in. that, and maybe i can finally clean the house...

happy training, y'all!

frozen hill

yesterday i had hill repeats and an interval spin on deck.

i was supposed to get up at 545am to do my run, so i could do the spin in the evening once the CTO got home. i know i set my alarm, and my phone was plugged in, but yet i did not awaken at 545am. methinks i sort-of woke up, and in my sleepy state accidentally turned the alarm off instead of hitting snooze. wah wahhh.

so the spin bike and i had a little date during the dudebaby's nap. some crazy sh*T happened during his nap that i won't go into, other than to say a near-death experience happened. for real. i got 3/4 of the way through the workout before it happened, and afterwards i was too shaken to finish.

this also meant i had to run hill repeats in Charlestown after the CTO got home at 8pm.

in this:

there's nothing quite like a 10 degree wind chill in 20 degree weather to get the booty a-movin'! i ran my repeats 5 min faster than last month, and that's with two additional repeats! i consider this to be an amazing feat of athleticism, considering i was wearing every item of clothing i own and running into 9.4mph gusts of frozen air.

it was so cold my teeth hurt. inside my mouth.

additionally, i may or may not have stepped on a dead baby rat, or a dead adult mouse. in my defense, i thought it was a leaf. didn't get the crunch i was expecting, though... don't worry i clorox wiped the bottoms of my shoes. no Hanta virus for baby, thank you. i also think i stepped in vomit. these are some of the reasons we are looking to move out of our neighborhood.

i had intended on finishing the spin after the run, but, well, that just didn't happen.

hope y'all had a warmer and less eventful Thursday than i did!

pool school

so, i totally got my ass handed to me in the pool this morning.

i shared a lane with a large, muscle-y Asian girl with back muscles that could beat me up all on their own. and in the lane next to us was a lady with -2% body fat and an M-dot tattoo on her shoulder.

muscle-y girl in my lane was doing some sort of long repeat, 400's if i counted right. she was still finishing faster than me, and i was doing 250 repeats AS FAST AS I COULD GO.

i don't look forward to these anaerobic swim workouts--i've always had a hard time with them. yes, i know they're supposed to be hard, but i have an especially hard time. the wheels fall off the bus if i have to go fast. so this workout takes some mental peptalk just to get me into the water. then it takes more peptalk to do the workout as prescribed (and not, say, take a 1:15 rest instead of 30s...)

so imagine how absolutely thrilled i was to be between these two Speedy Gonzalez ladies on my least favorite day in the pool. two years ago, before the kidlet, i would have just wussed out and not done the speed work. i probably would have done some super easy drills and sloooow laps just to prove that they were only going faster than me because i wasn't trying.

not today. i gave it my all (please read to the tune of Mumford & Sons 'i gave my all'). granted, i still got my ass handed to me, but i really tried my best. and i stayed focused on swimming the best repeats i could, and not trying to swim like the ladies next to me. it was excellent mental practice for Louisville, where i am likely to get passed by 70% of the field. (that, and muscle-y girl was super big and splashy, so i got practice in choke-swallow-neti-potting water and near drowning in her wake. )

now, i'm not posting this to be all 'oooh poor me i'm soooo slow' and then sandbag it and really swim 1:20 100s. i can swim, and i swim a lot, but i still don't consider myself a swimmer. i only did one summer of swim team in 5th grade. all of my swimming ability, or lack thereof, is self-taught. i'm not terrible--i'm just not a natural swimmer. i feel kind of like this most of the time:

which is why i'm proud of myself today. i think i've earned a nap!

early bird

after the week of crazy fatigue, i decided to try something different when it came to my workout timing. previously, i did the majority of my workouts either: in the late afternoon while the kiddo napped, or at night after the CTO got home. that was just not working with the fatigue, since i felt the best early in the day, and then slowly dissolved into motionless goo by the end of the afternoon.

this week i decided that getting up at the ass-crack of dawn and doing a workout was better than sleeping through or not doing a workout at all. and i was right. (as usual/always.) the 530AM wake-up call hasn't bothered me since nursing school. i'm also one of those people that wakes up immediately (unlike the CTO, who needs to hit snooze 7 times, take a shower and have a cup of coffee before he can make a sentence...)

this is what it looked like on the way to my Friday swim session...toasty.

this week was the perfect time to try the early workouts out (weird sentence but i'm to lazy to attempt a re-phrase) because this week is the first week of IM training where i had 2-a-days. weeeeeeeee.

here's what it looked like:

M: rest day
T: 1:15 aerobic endurance spin + strength training
W: anaerobic endurance swim (these anaerobic ones are not my favorite! 5x250 very hard intensity VHI main set. blergh.)
Th: 55min sprint interval spin + 50min MI run
F: aerobic endurance swim (100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 main set on 10sec RI)
Sa: 2hr spin *more mental training for me than anything. it took all my willpower to stay in that seat!
Su: 8mi run (+ strength training which I was supposed to do Saturday but forgot about, heh, eh, oops.)

hope y'all had a fabulous training week!

Black Cat 10 miler

considering the crushing fatigue i experienced at the beginning of the week, i didn't expect to run this race, let alone do well in it. i went into the race without having been physically active in a week. that's not so much an unintended taper as it is a coma.

saturday morning rolled around and i felt fine. my internal mommy alarm clock woke me up 10 minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, which was AWESOME because my stupid iPhone died during the night. it may have died during the night because a certain someone (perhaps me) left the maps app open with GPS on. oops.

despite the technology failure, i managed to be up, fed, dressed, coffee-d, and on my way to Salem by 6:30am. Salem is about 40 minutes away, and the race was set to start at 8am. one of my favorite things about the race was the 'e-race packet.' they sent you all the info you needed, plus online coupons instead of paper ones. it made actual packet pick up on race day so much easier because you just had to pick up your race bib--no paper crap to schlep back to the car. all that basically means i didn't have to leave as early as i otherwise would have--i am one of those crazy people whose nerves require them to be one of the first people to the race...you never know what could happen!

another thing i really appreciated about the race was the availability of INDOOR restrooms. granted, they had plenty of porto-potties at the race, but they were outside, and it was 28 degrees. i don't know about y'all, but even with my pooping propensity i absolutely cannot poop outside when it is that cold.

there were lots of super fast-looking runners out there, and i found out during the race that it is a tune-up/prep for Boston Marathon. needless to say, i only saw those runners as they passed me on the out and back. i'm always amazed by them; they make it look so easy.

i didn't plan much for this race, mostly because i wasn't even sure if i was going to be able to do it. the last time i ran a 10 miler i did it in 1:40 on a super hilly course in ATX. since this course was supposed to have gentle rollers with only one big hill, i unscientifically determined i should be able to do it in 1:36. i also decided i should negative split the run (which is hilarious to me now, thinking back on it, seeing how i have never negative split anything ever in my life.)

welp. i ran it in 1:36:47, and i negative split the dern thing. it took all of my mental effort to go SLOW at the beginning and not get caught up with all of the crazy marathoners. i held 9:45-9:48 min/mile for the first 4 miles, even considering the big hill going into Marblehead. miles 4-5 were mostly downhill, so i sped up a bit to 9:30. i tried really hard not to blast down the incline and murder my quads...i was glad of this shortly thereafter when i hit the turnaround and had to go back UP that incline. it took some strong mental words with myself to keep the 9:30-9:35 pace up the rollers back into Salem. i probably would have come in a little earlier than 1:36 if i hadn't shared one of my GU's on course around mile 5--i felt pretty bonky and in need of kcals around mile 8.5 and dropped my pace a bit back into the 9:40s. but once i hit mile 9 the mental joy of almost being done gave me an extra kick and i ran the last mile in 9:10.

my new shoes seemed to have helped the hip problem, as i didn't have any big aches, pains or twinges during or after the race. all in all, i am more than happy with this race outcome. oh, the value of low expectations! i kid, i kid. i had a lot of fun running and trying to picture myself being smart, even, and running my own race at Louisville. every time someone passed me (which was almost everyone. even a 200lb girl my height...she was booking it. nice work, sister!) i would give myself a little peptalk about running my own race, and then settle back into my rhythm. it was great mental and physical training for IMLou.

i had such a good time, i'm almost sad i don't race again until May (NE Season Opener Sprint.) i'm sure coach will keep my busy... i just got my March training plan and BOYHOWDY i can already tell some of those workouts are going to kick my bootay! bring it!