Follow Through

This week was sort of a bad one for me in many respects. I let my school work get the best of me - instead of working hard on my studies at a moderate rate, I saved all of my work for last minute and exhausted myself. I had a 10 page paper due on Tuesday and my first project in my hardest class due on Thursday. I sacrificed eating well, getting enough sleep, and exercise for my school work. Now, I know that school is important (if for no other reason than I'm paying tons of money to be here), but it should not keep me from living well. I have to learn to balance my life in a more effective way.

My runs were less than stellar. I'm slowly upping the speed at which I run (this week I moved up to 5.1 from 5.0), which makes my runs a bit harder, but I am nonetheless disappointed in myself. I skipped going to the gym on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and because of that, I only got in 3.75 miles this week, and compared to last weeks 6.67 miles, that's pretty bad. Today I ran 2 miles, which is over half of last weeks total. That's kind of ridiculous. It's okay though, it was just one week.

This week I'm going to focus on getting comfortable with my 5.1 mph runs. It hasn't been too bad, but I'm not nearly as comfortable running at 5.1 mph as I was at 5.0 mph. Today I did a little bit of interval training: 12 minutes at 5.1 mph, walk 3 minutes, run 5 minutes at 6.0 mph, walk 5 minutes, run 6 minutes at 5.1 mph, ending with a 5 minute cool down walk. It was a pretty good work out, and I was proud of myself for pushing myself to run half a mile at 6.0 mph. It was hard, but I could have gone a couple minutes longer. I don't think I could push myself to run a whole mile at 6.0 mph, though. In time! One of my long term goals is to work up to 6.0 mph, which is why I'm slowly increasing my speed.

I'm also having trouble keeping myself hydrated, so I really need to work on that. Especially because I like to run in the mornings, I need to make sure I'm adequately hydrated before I go to bed each night, so that when I wake up I don't have to chug a ton of water and hope that it doesn't slosh around in my belly.

Edit: I was just reading through a post from December and realized that I achieved a goal without realizing it! To run 1.5 miles on the treadmill without stopping. Woo! I've gotten up to 2.0 miles, so that goals been reached. How about running straight for 25 minutes on the treadmill as my next goal? I've done 24 minutes once, but it was hard and I would really have to push myself to go further. Sounds like a plan!