Couch to 5K - Week 5, Day 3 (time workout)

Breakfast: Greek yogurt, 1 TB Fig preserves, 1/3 cup walnuts. Water with acai berry flavor EmergenC.

Brisk 5 minute warm up walk

Brief stretching routine

Run twenty minutes

Longer stretching routine

 Kee-rist. I need to cut back on my smoking. I need to actually quit smoking, but I prefer keeping my crutch and cutting back on it use. 

I’m embarrassed to even be posting the fact that I still smoke, but I do. I have a cigarette in stressful times. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of stressful times lately. Instead of screaming and pulling my hair out and collapsing into a whimpering ball of snot, I have a cigarette. I know all about how bad they are; you don’t have to tell me. I know precisely what I’m doing to my body.  I also know there are times when I want that fucking cigarette so goddamn bad I will drop kick an orphan if she’s standing between me and my pack.

I found this when I Googled for an image of "whimpering ball of snot".
Well, that ain't it, but it's very...very...mesmerizing.
picture credit: DRES13

I want one now, thinking about how embarrassed I will be when I post this. I’m posting it anyway; in the extremely remote chance that…I don’t know….maybe my embarrassment helps someone somewhere. Whatever. I want a smoke NOW and I don’t have any. I want to finish this post before I go get some.

Breathing was very difficult today (fucking duh). The two half miles I timed I did in 8:09 and 7:31.

Hey, have I mentioned I ran twenty minutes today? Because I did. I ran twenty minutes.

Yes, breathing was very difficult. As I was running and breathing heavily (and with difficulty) I was noticing all the lumpy hills off the stretch of road I use. The area I run through most frequently is an unfinished subdivision. Long unfinished, when the economy tanked they just stopped building. And the obligatory twenty foot high piles of dirt that bloom at building sites just got left where they were. They’ve worn down some and they’re covered with plant-life.

Not quite this awesome are the mounds on my street...
Kościuszko Mound, Krakow, Poland

 

I could use those. I could use those for training for the DGMR. I could also go over to the park across the railroad tracks and use the play equipment. I need to take a picture of these hills.

Mutherpussbucket, it was COLD this morning. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. Fifty degrees is not that cold, not compared to winter. But it was cold enough to make me put on my navy long knit pants and wear a light jacket.

The damn pants kept slipping down. My navy long knit pants are too loose to run in now. So I got that little victory today.

So I ran all the way up the street and back down again, a distance of approximately 1.7 miles, in 21:39.

I can’t understand this, but I feel sort of scared. I should feel more excited by this achievement, and part of me does. But I have to go to the grocery store today.  I have to go to the big one…I think I’ll go to Schnucks, it’s off on the outskirts of town, not the middle.  And also there’s a reception at someone’s house we need to go attend later today. There’ll be a lot of strangers at the reception. People I don’t know I mean; TheMan knows them.

 

It'll be like this. Perfectly nice people at an outdoor party.
Picture credit: Some old Dutch master I'm too lazy to look up 'cause he's dead a long time.

It will feel more like this. A nerve-wracking blur of noisy sound and people I don't know.
Picture credit: Fanfnirr?

 Okay, I’m getting really cold sitting here. The overhead fan is on and for reasons I won’t go into I could shut it off but I’d have to remember to turn it back on and I don’t want to have to try and remember. So I’m stopping now, with my grumpy grouchiness.