It Was a Good Week

I had a goal for last week. Reign crazy project in. The life of a consultant, however, makes this a wee challenging. Don't play the game, you don't get ahead. Play it too much and you wind up dead on your feet. My goal this week was just find that balance a little bit better and hope like hell I could hang onto it.

Week 1 went well. I managed to not only leave the office while the sun was up, but leave the office, hit the hotel, throw on running clothes and give myself some time out on the streets. Actually, I should amend that... one day it was still bright enough to run outside. The other 2 it was on the treadmill, but that's better than nothing. I think switching the runs from the morning to the evening is better. And with a little negotiation, I was able to offset some of the fear that I was leaving at 6 by working after my run. Cool. I did have the requisite team meeting at 9pm again, but was able to work my negotiation skills once again to allowing me the run buffer between office and meeting. I don't feel too bad about this since we all start work at 7:30am each day. One week down... whether I can hang onto this and walk the fine line of caring about myself and my project equally (you can never be better than the client, afterall) is something we will have to discover over time.

So I got in my runs on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday... Wednesday being my outdoor run. I am never in glamorous places that I can run through... I always seem to be in a hotel nestled into an office park. This client is no different. So the run was not very exciting scenery wise, but it felt good to be off the treadmill. I also managed to get in my stretching after my run, which is a lengthy endeavor post physical therapy... but then again, its a small price to pay to never have to lose a year and a half of running again. Cause that plain sucks.

Right now I am working hard on increasing my frequency of runs... one of the problems with marathon training in this crazy little lifestyle is that consistency goes out the window. There were a lot of weeks where I had just one short run in during the week and then my long run on the weekend. This isn't the best way to pull off a marathon and I knew it. But I had the luxury of not needing to worry about time, given it was my first run back from that year and a half. Now I have something to prove and I need to do it right. So I need to be consistent. I need to have at least 5 out of the 7 days spent running. I've given myself Thursday as my off day because of the commute home. The rest are supposed to be run days. This week, however, I missed Friday. Fridays tend to be a lot of non-client work and this Friday a lot had accumulated, so I had to just suck it up.

Yesterday Marisa and I did a run together. I consider this my aerobic run because its very low intensity for me while she is getting back into running. I know that once she is a little more settled into running again, she will give me a run for my money, so I can enjoy this now. Today I will take one of her yoga classes and then do a run by myself which will be back to redeveloping the pace I lost. It's funny how I see flashes of that old pace... that day I was hitting my 7:23 pace in my last marathon training run. I just don't have the cardiovascular system to support it anymore. No sooner had I found that cardio support for that pace to begin with that it all fell apart. So I am trying little by little to bring that back. A little speedwork, some fartleks, some hill training and hopefully we will be there. And maybe, just maybe, come marathon time I will be back to my old self. Yea!

Ok, that's all I got for now. More later.