First, thank you to every one for your support. Unemployment continues to suck, but mostly because I have nothing to do. I'll spend about four-five hours a day doing job search related stuff, but then I'm bored out of mind for the other 20 hours. Fortunately, I have lots of people that are helping me out and passing my resume every which way. I'm really hoping that I'll have a couple interviews lined up by next week so that I can relax a bit and enjoy the time off.
Meanwhile, training for the NYCM is coming along. Last week in South "flat as a pancake" Florida messed me up a bit. No hills meant I temporarily lost all the climbing strength in my legs. Then, with the oppressive heat and humidity I allowed myself to slow down by 10 seconds on each run. I don't know if that made the runs easier but I did end up drinking far less water than anticipated.
You can imagine the hard time I had doing my fast tempo run in hilly Astoria Park.
However, now with ample time to properly execute all my weekday runs I made it a point to correct my lazy legs. For yesterday's hill repeats I went to the Queensboro Bridge, which I thought would be a great setting because it's the hill at Mile 16 of the NYCM--and it's the only uninterrupted 400m stretch of uphill nearby. But instead of taking the subway there I had the brilliant idea to do a "warm-up" two mile jog to the Bridge. It sounded like a good idea at the time.
The repeats went really well and I managed to cut my 400m uphill sprint time from 1:57 to 1:41. Save for the occasional biker who would wander into the pedestrian lane, the repeats were pretty uneventful...but then I had to return home.
I accidentally left my MetroCard at home so I had to repeat that two mile jog back to the apartment. Halfway through I started getting heart burn, but at the same time it started raining, so I would cycle through running until the heart burn would flare up and then walking until I could take the rain any more. Ugh.
Today, I followed up that hill workout with a hilly Marathon pace run. I took the same route to the Queensboro Bridge, then ran over it into Manhattan to finish up with a three mile loop in Central Park. I.e., hills, hills, and more hills. My knees were not happy at all when I was done--but I did get my climbing legs back!
Now to work on speed.
3 comments:
Just catching up: Sorry about the job loss. That frickin stinks, but I'm sure something else will come up soon!
And your boredom reminds me of that episode of Friends when Ross is on sabbatical for his "rage." And he organizes the contents of the refrigerator!
Ugh, that is such a bummer . . . I'm so sorry to hear about the job loss. I'm sure you'll find something soon; I've been hearing about all kinds of people finding new gigs, so I feel like things are starting to look up.
But I hear you on the boredom factor . . . I'm already bored, and today was my first day of unemployment. Why did I think I needed a month off before starting school? Ugh . . . there's only so much daytime television one can watch!! Hang in there!! :)
That sucks about the heart burn. I had a run like that the other day after eating a buffalo chicken sandwich for lunch. Never again.
Pretty soon I'll be like my grandpa - always popping Tagiment.
Post a Comment