Sunday long run

My grandmother once told me that she gets out of bed when she wakes up.  No dozing.  Nowadays, she naps during the day, but she still gets up early, or at least she still did last summer when we were all at the lake.  Maybe now that she's 93 or 94 and isn't taking care of 5 kids and a disabled war vet husband anymore, she lets herself sleep in a little.

I try to be tough and get out of bed when I wake up, and I did that in our last place, and in other places, but I've been very sloppy here.  The line between sleep and wakefulness has become so blurred that often I don't wake up fully until I'm in the bathroom or even downstairs, and this is after I've dreamt that I've gotten out of bed and gone there a few times already.   It's disorientating.

But it's taken me a while to realize that perhaps I don't need to keep to a strict time schedule (failing to do so has generated some anxiety) so much as avoid dozing.   If I don't doze, perhaps everything else will fall into place.  Therefore, I will not doze!

SUNDAY, after staying up until 4 am, I woke up and didn't doze at about 8:20, and got dressed and on the TM in a fog.  The planned workout was a Daniel's mixed pace one: 4-5 X 1000M at tempo pace, 1 hr easy, 3 X 1000M at tempo pace.

I decided that, though my 1000M tempo repeats would probably be about 5 minutes long, I would do just 4.  I was cowardly and half-awake, but lucid enough to reason that the elite athletes Daniels coaches would do the tempo repeats in 3 ish minutes, likely.  4 was extra hard!

Amazingly, I hit upon a really good tempo pace.  On my poorly calibrated treadmill (or with my decrepit body), tempo pace was 6.5 mph.   It was fast enough to feel that things were revved up, hopefully close to my lactate threshold because that's the whole point, but not fast enough to get out of breath during 4 minutes.

And I was so tired that I had no choice but to run efficiently.  Sometimes fatigue ushers in the best runs.  I felt that my hips and quads were loose and, much more importantly, that the outsides of my ankles and feet were propelling the balls of my feet downward.  This quickened foot strike is a new feeling for me, and it's much more efficient.

My easy run pace was 4.6 mph.  After 20 minutes, I stopped for a drink, and then figured that instead of tiring myself out with a run, I should squeeze in some loudly crying housework.  Just ten minutes, and then I'd run another 1/2 hour....

Well, the house was a mess, and over an hour later, I stopped moving things/vacuuming/scrubbing/etc and  tackled the 3 X 1000M reps.  Then I did a MarC workout.

MONDAY, today, I woke up at 6:30ish and did not doze.  Housework presented itself again: when I tried to let the dog out, it was raining and cool.  The dog decided to wait for better conditions, but the temp was right to finally open some windows in this place.

SHOCKINGLY, most of the windows don't have screens and almost all of them are painted shut.  This is something we failed to notice when we viewed the house in the winter.  I got distracted by other things and the weather got mostly too hot to keep the windows open, etc, etc...major procrastination on my part.  The previous tenants were quasi level 3 hoarders--I had to spend 7 hours scrubbing dog fecal matter off the floors (another thing that we didn't notice until too late because the wooden floors are naturally mottled) and I knew that this place needed airing out and I suspected that I would sleep better if I could get some fresh air into the bedroom, but never got round to it.

Today was the day to hammer some frames loose!  .  Fortunately, the two in the workout room/library can open almost all the way, and one has a functional screen!  Same thing with the bedroom two!!  Unfortunately, most of the other windows on the floor have paint on the pulley cords, making them difficult to open more than a few inches, if that, but I turned on the ceiling fans and got the air moving.  My husband helped me lift open a few because the frames have been painted and not scraped, and so the fit is very tight.  Fortunately, we don't own this place--pretty much every window needs some work or replacement.

I'm not a huge fan of A/C although I have appreciated it sometimes; I cannot understand the mindset of living in a place where the windows don't open.  Yes, it's mostly hot enough for A/C now, but what about the fall and warmer winter days?  And, yes, the air intake for the A/C is outside, but through probably dusty ducts.   It's amazing how much fresher the upstairs seems now.  Maybe now I won't be caught in a semi-sleeping-semi-waking zone, nor have such disturbing dreams (a whole other matter that I've been pondering).

I jogged on the treadmill for 20 minutes/1.6x miles and did Zwow #7.