The inside of my left elbow has been throbbing on and off since yesterday. It’s actually slightly uncomfortable. Not sure what’s going on there.
I haven’t been writing as much about running lately, but I have been running. I thought that maybe if I didn’t write much about it, I wouldn’t put so much pressure on myself. Because I get really bummed out when I see my times, and they’re so slow, and the heat and humidity take their toll. I’m sort of confused about what my goals are at the moment. In theory I’m training for a marathon, but I’m not sure that my head’s all in it.
I mentioned this to a running friend last night, and she looked at me and said matter-of-factly “yeah, but you never like training.” I thought about this a lot over the course of the evening. Do I not like training? I do train. But I complain about it. I do train. But I often procrastinate and wait until the last minute to start.
It made me start thinking about why I run in the first place. I’ve been doing it for more than 5 years now, so I obviously don’t hate it.
Who knows, maybe I need to quit concentrating on events and just run for a while. Because ultimately, I started running to lose weight. It’s helped me do that (even though I’ve gained some back) and there have been a lot of other benefits that came with it. Meeting people, taking up new activities, being more self-confident in general.
I’ve lost 2 pounds in the last couple weeks. That’s not shabby.
Last night with all that swirling around in my head, I went ahead and did the BAF-prescribed 4×400 workout. Actually, I did 4×0.25-mile, which is almost the same thing. I ran the repeats pretty hard — not 100%, but definitely 95%. For the recoveries, I walked the first 0.1 and jogged the remaining 0.15.
2:13 (3:48)
2:16 (3:46)
2:07 (3:45)
2:12 (3:48)
With a 1 mile warmup and 1 mile cooldown, the run was an even 4 miles.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
