Thursday, May 21, 2015

Exercise Diary: Yoga again

The past month and half has been hellish.  Even since I started TAing I had neither the time nor energy to do anything else.  It's not just the big time commitment that I all of a sudden had, it's also the physical exhaustion after doing all the extra work and the mental exhaustion that also tags along.  I had at least two teaching lab related dream (neither were nightmares but still 2 too much).

So as my actual research work falls behind, naturally my exercise routine also went out of wack.

I can see from my blogging history that I have not written anything for over a month now, but from my Nike record I have been running slightly more regularly.  None of the runs were particularly good, or fast, or anything worth writing anything down.  The only thing about my recent runs is that they are almost exclusively done outdoors, which means beautiful scenery.  I did take many pictures on the road, which also meant that I wasn't fully paying attention to the running.  None of the runs were good either.  They were slow, they were short, and none of them made me feel any better or stronger.  And since I decided to not run the half-marathon (which would be this weekend), I really had no specific milage goals for my runs either.

But TA is almost over (last lab finished this week, still a few more grading and things to be done before I'm finally liberated), and the mental pressure has significantly gone down.  Especially this week I found myself particularly free and eventless in the evenings and I have been sleeping a lot more.  I recently bought a new pair of running shoes (the much raved Saucony Kinvara 5) that will be arriving tomorrow and I'm really excited about it.  And I went to yoga today for the first time since beginning of April.

It's probably the weather, but one of the first things I noticed was that I had never sweated as much in a yoga class as today and that was kind of alarming.  I expected having my butt kicked, and I did, but having sweat dripping from my forehead was not one of my anticipations.  But it wasn't until more than half way through the class that I felt like someone who has had lots of yoga classes for the past year and half.  Toward the end I finally felt that I have properly opened my body and was rewarded with the familiar feeling of energy flowing through my body and actually feeling good after a particular series of moves.  And I hope this will be the beginning of a lot more regularly attended classes.  I made a yoga class date with a friend for Saturday, and I bought another 10-class pass, so yoga is so back on!

And running tomorrow.  I will run tomorrow.  I downloaded a 10K workout app that will give me about 5 weeks of regular running plans, and I will buy the half-marathon app after that.  I don't know if I will be ready to try this year's CHaD half marathon in October, but whether or not I'm actually running it I really need the goal to get real training.  So as summer approaches (finally!), as the spring school term ends, I will finally go back to a more regular exercise schedule, and hopefully, life.

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