run

Free Run, Day 6

Sunday, September 24th, 2023 

Ok. Ok ok ok, so, yes, it is Sunday, I’m a day off from my routine, and much like the other time I deviated from my plans, I feel relatively ok about it, but with that small creeping feeling that I’ve done something wrong. I know that I haven’t, but being the creature of habit, it’s killing my spirit a bit. But it’s fine. Yesterday, the day I would have run, we were in the car for a little over 13 hours as we drove back to the city where we then discovered that the door to both our apartment and our neighbor’s apartment had been roughed up in, what we thought was, an attempt to break in. It was only when we spoke to a different neighbor that we were told there was a fire in the basement 😶😶😶😶and that the doors were messed up because of the fire department trying to gain access.

So. Yeah. That was fun to come home to. But thankfully, the apartment is fine, it was not broken into, and the building is safe…..I guess…..? I mean I have to assume that it is sound; otherwise we wouldn’t have been allowed back in, right? But seeing as there was no communication about said almost break-in as well as about THE FIRE IN THE BASEMENT, who knows if anything is ever really safe. Wild. Absolutely wild. 

But I bring all of this up because there was a part of me that thought that I might go for the run last night after we unpacked while the soup was cooking on the stove. That was my plan, come in, unpack, make some nice soup with vegetables because those are hard to come by in the south, and then go for the run while it simmers. But with the tropical storm, oh yeah, there was a tropical storm that followed us up the coast as well, and then with what I’m coining as FireGate2k23, I figured best not to temp fate and didn’t run. What I should have done was go Friday while we were still in Myrtle Beach, but the day got away from me, and I didn’t think it would be a) so rainy, and b) the aftermath of a blaze to deal with. 

So here we are. Sunday morning. With the remnants of the tropical storm still trickling down outside. I’m not bothered so much by the rain, I don’t plan to be outside for long, and let me tell you why. SO, I follow @meg_takacs on Instagram. She is a RUNNER and was brought to my attention by my dear and darling friend, Nikki. Now, Meg is amazing for a lot of reasons, but mostly, for me, I find her to be so approachable. Along this journey, I’ve started following a lot of runners and running pages on the medias, and most of them leave me feeling really intimidated, whereas Meg leaves me feeling incredibly inspired. And she is so strong, like so unbelievably fucking strong. I was joking with Nikki the other day that I’ll watch Meg in one of her videos about exercises to do to strengthen your legs/ankles/knees, and she makes it look SO effortless, and then I’ll try to do it and have to sit down for the next three days. And usually when I see people do stuff like that, like really impressive strength stuff, it irks me, but with Meg, I don’t know, and maybe it’s because she was recommended to me by someone whom I trust implicitly, but I just love to watch her stuff and to learn from her and to try to make myself a better runner in turn. 

She posted a video last week about how to build endurance, I think I touched briefly on it in a previous post, but here are her tips: 

Aerobic runs 

Long runs 

Speed Work 

Elevation Gain Focused 

Cross Training Day 

I feel like I have been doing a lot of long runs – well, long for me, I have a suspicion that her long run is miles on miles on miles – and aerobic runs, but I have totally been lacking in the speed work, elevation gain, and cross training. Maybe I can cut myself a little slack with the cross-training of it all because I do do those mediocre workouts that don’t push me, but I want to be doing more – re maybe signing back up for NYSC or Planet Fitness and getting an in person trainer. But, yeah, speed work and elevation? Nah. And y’all, don’t think it’s lost on me that I could VERY EASILY implement elevation gain into my workouts. How many times have I talked about the hills in my neighborhood and HOW 👏 MANY 👏TIMES👏have I told you that I am adjusting my workout to avoid them?! 

🤣🤦🏻‍♀️

It’s ok, though. It is all good. I have just over a month before this 5K, and I am really going to be smart about these next few weeks of training, and I am going to push myself, in a healthy way, to make this a really great debut 5K. So today, in this rain, I’m going to work on speed. I’m going to find a patch of asphalt that isn’t super slick, and I’m going to run sprints for about 20-25 minutes or so. I’m not going fo distance at all today, though I’ll still track it. 

I think, if I’m being honest, and I can feel you screaming at the screen UGH DUH, ALLY, I think I’ve been too caught up in the numbers of it all. Which I have read is a thing with newer runners, do get off my back alright? But it is. Apparently a lot of newer runners get hyper-focused on numbers and the graph of time VS distance and I have absolutely fallen victim to that. I don’t think I’ll ever fully not care about those things, but I do want to be better about remembering that this is a training process, and that there will be days when I will just run for the sake of the run and not for any kind of goal and that is so ok. 

Alright. Off I go into the rain. I’m also going to swing by that basement so your girl can peep the damage, because #newyorkrubberneckingisathing

POST-RUN MORTUM

Time Running: 20:23 minutes

Distance Achieved: 1.77 miles

Tunage: Hamilton

Ok so that was interesting! Not necessarily my favorite thing in the world but certainly not my least favorite thing either! It is also not lost on me that in essentially 20 minutes, I nearly hit my mileage from Thursday when I ran for 30 minutes, so maybe there is something to the sprinting of it all. 

I definitely feel different muscle groups that were activated by today’s workout, particularly in my groin area, but not so much in my hips, which I’m very pleased about. Not sure if it’s because I spent the majority of this past week going from salt water pools to the North Atlantic to many and various hot tubs or if it’s because I really have been so much more conscious of how I am running and what muscle groups I am intending to activate, but my hip flexors are not screaming out in agony as they have been. Another win! 

My route today was essentially this mini track in a park by our apartment. It’s really just a circular path, but people use it to walk and run all the time, and I like it because it’s not as big and imposing as an actual track. I think one lap of it is ⅛  mile, so you have to go around it more than you would a normal track, but, again, it’s not as intimidating. I sprinted along one straightaway, then walked the bottom curve, the opposite straightaway, and then the top curve, then sprinted again. Round and round I went, and I’m realizing now that I should have kept track as to how many laps I did, but ahh well. Why start planning things at this stage in the game, right? I oddly liked the repetition of it, which is strange because you know my feelings about treadmills and tracks. But there was something nice about the flow of this. The spike in the heartrate and then the slight cool down before going right back into it and elevating it again. I am also surprised at how far I got considering I walked ¾ of this workout, but I’ll take it. I also look forward to the day when I can maybe sprint both straightaways or even get in a full lap and then walk a lap, but for today, I feel good about what I did. I was super aware of my breath and my stride, which at the top of the sprint felt AMAZING. I felt my legs stretching out and my heel making full contact with the pavement. It was awesome. 

I do have to say though, my body felt a little out of control. I don’t mean that in a dangerous way, or like I was flailing or anything like that, but the way I normally run, my body feels contained. I jiggle a little here and there, obviously, I’m a big girl running, but I don’t think it looks egregious or anything. Today though, my whole body felt like some gelatenous blob that was being activated in some chem lab. And it was OK at first. For the first ten minutes, my only companion was a man having a very heated argument on speaker phone, because, of course, who was pacing up and down the straightaway I was sprinting on, but then church let out, and the park was much busier than before and I felt incredibly exposed. It didn’t stop me from doing the sprint, but I was just so aware of how my body was moving inside of the sprint. 

All in all, though, even with me feeling like Flubber, I feel really good about today’s run. I wish Meg had posted about endurance earlier, and she likely has, but I’m not really one to scroll on people’s pages, but I’m grateful that I saw it when I did because even beyond this 5K that I’m training for, I will implement this into future runs and workouts. Because how I’ve been training so far has just been to sort of repeat the same thing over and over, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s built up my muscles and stamina for sure, but now we are ready for whatever the next part of this journey is. I’m working up to doing the hills in my mind. Maybe later this week. …maybe. No, I’ll do them. Possibly….. I’m just kidding, I’m going to do the hills. It’s…..going to happen.