I feel like it’s been forever since I posted (although it’s only been a 2-ish day hiatus). Life has been very busy and has me wiped out so here’s to getting a good night’s sleep tonight! Let’s see, where did I leave off?
Recovery Run Wednesday
My workouts are ending up very strange this week. I did my great track workout on Tuesday and knew I needed to get in the rest of my pre-race miles on Wednesday (I knew there was a good chance my Thursday/Friday business trip would keep me too busy to do much of anything – and I was right). Unfortunately, Wednesday turned out to be another really tired morning plus my body felt just wiped from Tuesday night’s hard effort. So I chose sleep (and therefore sanity). Since it’s been getting dark so early, I quickly realized that I would not have a real opportunity to run after work (20 minutes at most) and I NEEDED to test out my new Nike watch at least once before race day. Since I didn’t have an opportunity to duck out of work early, I decided I would treat the run as a test run, not worry about pace or distance, and just run as long/far as I could within a small radius of my house before pitch dark.
Wearing my electric yellow jacket and no-headphones was a must for safety reasons but I had a great run and got a chance to see a lot of the beautiful Christmas lights that people have on their houses around the community. I think this new watch is at least working a lot better but I could not completely tell. Unfortunately, the race will be a little bit of a test.
Travel Time
I had a 7:55 am flight to New Jersey on Thursday morning so that meant a very early wakeup call. I run habitually late so I built in a lot of extra buffer time. After a tiring but good day of business meetings, I didn’t get to bed quite as early as I had wanted to in my hopes of making up some missed sleep.
It was up early again this morning as our car was picking us up at 6 am at the hotel. I got back to my office from the airport by about noon and was so tired that I wish I could have ended my day right there. I stuck it out and finished out the normal work day somehow and it’s now time to do my mental race prep.
Tomorrow’s Race
Tomorrow, I am running the Historic Longwood/Lyman High School 5k. My impression is that this will probably be a smaller race and a smaller field (the big Orlando Half Marathon is taking place tomorrow morning too so that probably reduces the pool of potential racers). I am hoping to significantly improve on my last 5k race time (24:03). I have already beat it during training runs in the last couple weeks but you just never know how you’ll feel on race day. I am a bit nervous but I am trying to rest, relax, and drink lots of water tonight. I hope to be asleep by 9:30 if all goes according to plan so I can sneak in some extra hours of sleep.
Well…here goes nothing! Be ready for a report tomorrow.
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How do you beat travel exhaustion? Do you believe you can really catch up on sleep?
