Hammer and Sickle

Two days, two entirely different sets of legs.

Yesterday I was cut down. Hanson Marathon Method had an easy 8 on tap. I decided to sleep and go running with the jogging stroller after the kid had breakfast.

Get out, first block felt like hell. My left calf was a wreck. I was very close to turning around and going back. But I told myself two things:

1. Wife earned the silent house time.
2. Give the legs some time to warm up before calling a DNF.

Thankfully #2 proved right. Mentally it did it's damage though. Another run with a different pain to work through.

My kiddo provided some mental escape for me. At stretch time, she was hollering out what everything was, running! Bikes! Cars! Stretchies! Then I would watch how she played with her toys and propped her feet on the visor at face level.

Didn't use GPS. Wanted to not push the pace. I felt like I was going at a fresh pace.  On my return trip one middle aged guy holler at me as I passed him - Hey! It isn't nice to run by people while pushing a stroller (he said this jokingly). I responded - the longer I take, the higher the chances my kid throws a fit! And I zoomed off. My end pace averaged out to be an 8 minute mile. A fair bit faster than I had planned, especially dragging along the kid.


I saw a few runners that I usually see at the dark running hours, which was nice.  Also, Bethany @ Accidental Intentions mentioned she saw me, sadly I missed the exchange!

The rest of the day my legs felt pretty decent. I really wanted a good run on Tuesday for my strength run, so I took a couple ibuprofen before bed.  I went to bed at 9:45pm, as my alarm was set for 3:40am.

Although going to bed and falling asleep aren't the same thing.  Sleeping like a normal person for a week meant my body wasn't too tired.  Around 10:45pm, my daughter starts crying/screaming. Pretty rare for her as she is a good sleeper at night and soothes herself pretty quickly.  Not tonight. After multiple trips to try to calm her down, and them try to calm down to fall asleep, I maybe got over a little over 4 hours of sleep.

I was partly tempted to switch my run to an easy short run that was on the plan for tomorrow... but whatever, lets do this right.

I get out at about 4:20am.  My legs feel the best the have since Friday morning. Awesome!

There is a light briskness to the air. The stars are gorgeous. All I could see as I got to the lakefront was the white edges of the waves. It was a perfect morning. When I stopped to stretch, I just gazed at the sky and relaxed.

Today's plan - 3 x 2 mile intervals at 10 seconds faster than marathon pace, with 800m jogs in between. I tried to use the jog time to take pictures. So here are the photos:

My two mile split times should be about 13:45ish, maybe 13:48 per plan.

They went like this : 13:38, 13:39, 13:40.  A little bit faster than scheduled, but it was a good confidence booster.  Now lets hope I can maintain some healthy legs for more than 24 hours!

The rest of the details, 2.4 mile warm up. Ran with Erin for some of the warm up, did the splits, then 2. something cool down.

I tried my first selfie this morning as I matched my outfit so well!

For those that like rap, here is a shirt for us:

Have a great day everyone! I hope you aren't wearing white!