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Friday, August 18, 2017

The Struggle is Real

This was the Runner's World quote today.  Ugh.  Sometimes these drive me bonkers.

The last few weeks have been busy.  We had a lot of social commitments, family commitments, and of course, gearing up for school.  In our house, August is a rough month of anxiety for my daughter.  I have struggled with sleep.

I still was getting runs in, as you know if you follow my weekly training recaps or my Instagram. They weren't ideal, and my legs always felt tired, but I was having some punctuation of a good runs. Good runs are becoming the anomaly in my training instead of the norm.  That seems strange.

There are many ways to define a "good" run.  For me, a "good" run is one that first and foremost feels good.  It may not be easy but my body responds to the push I give it.  They have nothing to do with pace.  I can have a good run running 8:45/mile pace and one at 6:30/mile pace.

I keep pushing and pushing and my body is just not having it.  Everything hurts and feels very sluggish.  On every run.

I skipped running yesterday because I was so tired.  So tired that I went to bed at 6:30.  My kids barely fell asleep before I did.  I tried reading my book for a while, but the words were swirling together on the page so I reluctantly gave up and promptly fell asleep.

I woke at 3AM to the sound of my son getting out of bed, walking to our bathroom, turning on the light, and peeing.

Then I tossed and turned.  Tried deep breathing but could not get my breath to be slow and even and deep.  Eventually I fell back asleep.

This morning I got out of bed at my 5 AM alarm not because I wanted to but because I felt guilty that I had missed my run yesterday.

I started running and my legs were just screaming.  I chalked it up to mile 1, always a toughie.  My mile one beeped in at just over 8 min/mile.  I continued on and it was taking so much effort to run "easy".  My second mile beeped in at 8:47/mile.  I didn't feel great.  I decided that I needed to make up for the tempo run that I missed yesterday, come hell or high water.

I started running, fast, and immediately was huffing and puffing.  I got to the 0.75 mile mark and stopped.  I was at a 6:49/mile pace.  5 second slower than my goal half marathon pace.  I regained my breath and continued.  UGH.  Such a struggle.  My mile beeped in at 7:00.

I continued the fight for another 0.25 miles and then just gave up.  Clearly my body wasn't having this.

I tried to continue the shuffle/slow pace run and yet it was so so hard.  I ended up shutting my Garmin off and walking the rest of the way home (~0.6 miles).

I don't think I can keep pushing myself for 9 more weeks on this plan.  I know that I am supposed to be tired - that cumulative fatigue is the hallmark of the Hanson plan.  At some point I think I crossed a line into just fatigue.  I never felt like this during my marathon training.

I don't have any next steps.  I am just at a point where I am thinking long and hard about them.

1 comment:

  1. Sorry to hear about this. I think that sleep could be the culprit. It might be that you aren't recovering well enough from your runs without proper sleep, or just "down time" since you are always busy doing something. I would say don't give up on the plan quite yet. Maybe take a week off, or just running easy, and come back to it.

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