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October 16, 2004
Nutrition
I admit that I do not have the best body image/relationship with food. Every day I walk a very fine line. Many times I don't make the best food choices (candy corn, for example). A great deal of my issues comes from my childhood, I frequently got sick after I ate so I don't eat much because I associate eating with getting sick. Although I still struggle with it, I make an effort to eat meals with regularity. I've found what will work for me and eat pretty much the same foods at the same times every day. Since I run in the afternoons during the week, I usually eat small meals for breakfast and lunch (my stomach balks very easily) and a larger dinner after I run. As a result of skipping dinner on Thursday night, Friday was not pretty. Having my lunch taken made it even worse. I essentially went from dinner on Wednesday night until dinner on Friday night without a larger meal.
This morning I paid dearly for my nutritional mistakes. My tank was literally on "E". I've had this happen before and know what the cause is. My legs weren't tight, my lungs felt fine, my heartrate was not particularly high-I just had no energy. I thought that I wanted to run 80-90 minutes, but by 25 minutes or so I knew that was not going to be realistic. Lucky for me, most of the group was looking to run 60-70 minutes. The problem with most of our Saturday morning courses is that the shorter courses have the awful hills while the longer courses tend to be flatter. In other words, I may not have run as hard, but I had to pay for it with the hills. I actually had to stop, stretch out, and reset myself about 10 minutes from the finish of the course. My body just could not go anymore. The guy who I was running with ran his first marathon last Sunday and wasn't feeling too good himself, so he stopped with me and we were able to finish
I've found that, at least for me, it is harder to run slowly than to run my regular pace and stop when I need to. If I'm running any slower than 7:15 to 7:30 pace, it feels worse. When I'm feeling really bad, I'll go as long as I can at that pace, stop and stretch, then return to my regular pace. My form seems to alter too much when I slow down that it feels much worse and harder for me to run.
After I got done running, I did my usual Saturday morning stationary bike ride and lifting. This time the gym did have some nice trashy magazines for me to read while I was on the bike. I read Star weekly and got caught up on most of my celebrity gossip. It isn't like I really need to know who's dating who, but maybe one of these days it will come in handy. I also did my Saturday morning ice bath routine. It's getting harder to do it now since it's getting colder.
On the topic of being cold. I've decided that it isn't that I'm always cold, I just like to be warm. I was freezing this morning. I don't know how some of you out there wear shorts until it's in the 30s out. It was 50 degrees this morning and I considered wearing thin tights. I never got warm, in fact I was borderline comfortable.
In light of the fact that I only ran 8.5 to 9 miles this morning, I am almost positive that I'm going to race tomorrow morning. Hopefully there won't be too many fast runners at this race and I can do it more as a tempo effort. Since I raced last weekend, that means I'm doing laundry to get my racing outfit clean again. Laundry is a chore I absolutely loathe. I hope that I can get a long warm-up and long warm-down in to make up for my shortened long run today. I'm not too obsessed with my mileage because the base is there, but I do like to get a few longer efforts in each month.
Posted by Blondie at October 16, 2004 12:49 PM