I'm running behind on everything in life at the moment. Running schedule, workout exercises, research, preparing for lab that I'm supposed to TA next week, filing my taxes, doing stuff for mom, laundry, writing this blog after each time I run or exercise, and even leisure books I wanted to read. In fact the only things that I'm not behind are TA things or research things (or going to the movies) that require me to be at a certain place at a certain time. Because there are consequences if I don't show up on time. And even when I'm physically there I'm not always prepared to do whatever I'm supposed to be doing. When I don't have to be somewhere I waste my time just relaxing, being tired, and procrastinating in general.
I did manage to get two runs in this week, neither of which I have recorded, since I had to be somewhere right afterwards so I didn't have the luxury of sitting around, writing a blog post, shower, eat, and sitting around some more. I ran on Thursday, and had an hour to come home and shower before going to lab again to set up some stuff for one of the undergrads in our lab. And today I went running again, only to have the same time crunch afterwards so I could make to the 4pm movie of "Paddington" which I really wanted to see (and it was totally worth the $5).
And I didn't even have enough time to do all my running. I was supposed to do 3 miles on Thursday and only did about 2.8 before I had to go. And I was supposed to run 4 miles but only had time to do 3.2. Today was a combination of being really tired and being short on time. I again timed my lunch wrongly so I was sort of running on a full stomach and felt heavy and tired. Neither run felt very satisfying or accomplished. My only accomplishment this week is dragging my butt to the gym twice. What I ended up doing in there was nothing to brag about.
So today I made the decision of starting last week over again in terms of my training schedule. Even since I knew for sure that I'm not doing a half marathon in May I could feel a slight but definite drop in motivation (albeit masked by my suddenly busy schedule), and I think not going running on Monday was a very telling sign. I want to keep adhering to my training plan, even though I have no race at the end, but I just want to be constantly preparing for something in case a race shows up, and I just really need the discipline. Otherwise I will just be randomly running for some undetermined distance at some leisure speed, and I would be running for month without real progress. I really need the structure and something to guide me. I just hope I will stick to it now that there is no consequence at the end of the plan. When I reach the end I will just start a new plan, one that probably will prepare me for something hypothetical marathon I may or may not be running in December. But I want to keep it up. It's important to me.
Today I also did a Ballet Beautiful butt workout, courtesy of a friend who's been doing that series of videos for a while now. Apparently it's very good at getting rid of inches and sculpting good arm and leg shapes in a very short period of time. I still don't understand the science behind "getting rid of inches" and what is actually going on behind that, but I can only assume that the workout burns a lot more calories since they are very intense. A lot of the moves in this video were not unfamiliar to me, but of course there are always ways to make them more difficult given enough time. I definitely felt my legs and glute muscles after the workout, but I don't think I benefitted as much as I could by following the instructor at her speed. She was able to do all the moves so quickly and effortlessly, and it was sort of implied that we the students should really take our own time with the reps and the stretching in between, but since it was my first time I was determined to follow all her lead, and found that in order to keep up with her speed I couldn't carry out all the moves and reps fully. Next time if I ever will repeat this video I will definitely do the reps at my own pace. But I did end up taking a second shower of the day after this video and was walking a little more carefully, so it's definitely working, regardless of how carelessly I was doing all the moves.
I'm still in the process of reassessing my life for this term, how to balance the sudden intrusion of my time, ensuring a proper and healthy diet (I've already eaten more junky meals than I liked), and keep a reasonable workout schedule, since I think that's very important to my sanity as well. I need to suck it up and just do everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment