On Bad Workouts
Something I hadn’t really experienced before – mainly because I’d quit exercising before I would get to any point where it routinely made me feel great afterwards – is a bad workout. As time goes on and people are distanced from events, they tend to attach one emotion to an event or time period of their lives. Whether it be romanticizing your first love and forgetting the sometimes shitty things they would do or remembering a weekend a way as being terrible when really only one awful thing happened but the rest was actually pretty great, we are really good at forgetting the details. When I’m looking back at this blog months, or maybe even years from now, I don’t want to forget the little things – especially because, especially with this topic, it would be unfair for me to say running as often as I can always feels amazing. Because while it’s like that most of the time, every once in a while it really sucks. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today.
Right now I’ve been using the C25K app to lay out a running plan for me and then Under Armour’s MapMyRun app to track the run itself. (The last is a much newer addition so if you’re interested in adding me as a friend I’d love it) If you’re a beginning runner I 100% recommend C25K’s app to get you started. For me it was a really great way to give myself a plan to keep myself from getting burned out, and as I continue to use it I’ve found it to be a really good base that I can than tweak and add to as I need. Starting off the runs are usually only around 30 minutes, which is sometimes a little shorter than I want, so if I have the extra time to spare I will spend some extra time and either do the day’s run twice or my way out I’ll follow the app, and then the way back I alternate blocks sprinting and walking (or sprint two blocks, walk a block, etc…)
I didn’t have a picture that I liked enough for this post so you can have this one instead.
Last Friday I had an awesome run. It had been a couple days since my last run so it was a bit tough to start off with and wasn’t very long, but once I was warmed up I felt great the whole time, felt like I could push myself farther the next day, and knocked a solid minute off my average time/mile. Then on Saturday, after planning to go a bit farther/longer and push myself to go a little faster than my usual poky pace, I found myself struggling to even finish the 28 minute cycle on the C25K. It was the exact same run and time intervals as the day before so I couldn’t figure out what was up. Coming back down the hill was obviously easier, but I was still ready to be done by the time I got home. To my surprise when I checked my phone, my distance stats didn’t show any of my issues and my average time was even down by a few seconds, but while the numbers were definitely there my body could have told you something different.
Then even just a few hours later, once I’d sat down for a bit and taken a nice shower, I felt better than I had before the run, had more energy, and was back to my normal post-workout haze. But I wanted to write this to remind myself that sometimes, running sucks and you want to stop, and that’s completely normal. It’s really discouraging when it’s happening and you feel like you’re far from your best, but just keep on pluggin’ on and eventually you’ll feel alright. And you won’t feel as bad about eating the entire container of raspberries later that afternoon.
