Variety

Today is Monday. Mondays are normally days off, but these last two weeks have been anything but normal. I did a sprint race (duathlon) on Saturday morning, waited for the awards, and then jumped in the car for a 13-hour car ride home. We stopped about 8 times, so I got to get out of the car a lot, but I was definitely tight on Sunday. I managed to get in a 50-minute, 16-mile ride and that was it—just something to get my legs moving—so I requested a workout for today.

Will gave me something fun and different and I was excited about it. My rest intervals (10 deep breaths on the wall between the sets in the last 3) were negligible because they seem so pointless.

• 50 vertical jumps; after every 10, 30-seconds standing extreme hamstring: I really didn’t know what to do with my feet on the jumps because we’d always done these with vertical-jump-to-lunge, but I managed OK. There were a select few that felt really fast and high—those were typically the first ones in the sets when I would really focus on turning on my muscles. I need to do that for all of them or just never turn them off.
• 3×10 altitude drop push up: Before I started this one, someone pulled the fire alarm switch or something and we all had to go outside for a fire drill. I had a limited time and no flexibility, so I started these outside on the ground. I couldn’t (and still can’t) remember what to do once I’d dropped into the push up position; I’d better check some of my old pages. I did 2 sets outside, and then did a few more later in the evening. I don’t think I finished 10; if not, it’s because I forgot I was supposed to do 10 sets.
• 5×1 minute glute ham: No special instructions here, just do it. I didn’t feel like I was doing this very effectively, and I don’t know why. It was like my hamstrings just didn’t want to play along and I wasn’t working at all.
• 6×3 times each side Russian twists: This and the pushups I did at home, so I didn’t really go in the prescribed order. Also, Will said to use a 5-lb weight, but all I had was an 8-lb medicine ball, so I used that.

As much as I’ve enjoyed hosting people and being on vacation and having my parents here, I’ll be thrilled when I can get back to a normal schedule and actually have the time I need to get my workouts done and be able to focus on doing them right. I feel like more than half the workouts I’ve done in the last 2 weeks have been ineffective, like why did I even bother doing them?

I don’t know if this is because I’m frustrated with my races, which I am. I felt like I did my best in both of them, but I just didn’t seems like I was running very fast or efficiently, and that made me mad because I’ve been working hard. I just can’t run as fast as some of the other girls. Even though I can bike fast, I can’t run fast enough to keep them off me and I don’t know how I can get faster. I also want to be faster now, but I don’t know how to adjust my training so that I will be.

Maybe I’m just not good enough to get to the level I want to be at. At the very end of Saturday’s race, another girl was catching up to me and passed me within the last 0.25 miles or so, and I couldn’t even keep up with her for the last part. It was like inside, I was resigned to not winning and then my legs just wouldn’t work because of that. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to win because it was a duathlon, so I was racing like that, even if it was subconsciously. But now looking back, I’m sure it affected the way I ran in both those legs. I just can’t seem to get the mental part of this racing thing down. I want to win, but I can’t make my brain and my legs communicate. My legs just don’t seem to want to move fast enough and don’t really seem to care whether anyone passes me. My brain wants to care but thinks my legs can’t keep up, so I just barely try to speed up and then don’t last very long. I don’t know how to improve that!