Week of 12/07/2008 - 12/13/2008

The Stupid

Whether it was the shirking of physical therapy, the sudden week of concrete running, or my suddenly inspired burst of relative speed... maybe we'll never know. On Sunday, all I know was that I was not running... or ... walking. Man. One small step leads to one giant leap backwards.

And here I find myself... staring down the end of the year thinking... once upon a time I thought I'd race the 2008 cross season... then it was the 2009 track season... and now, it's looking like the 2009 cross season. Maybe there comes a point where it becomes so pathetic that it's painful to watch. Someone really needs to come and tape a big DNR on my racing career's chest.

Every time I take 4-6 days off, it gets harder... it gets harder to believe that things ever get better. It gets harder to shove down all the crazy and make good decisions. Towards the end of the week, I wasn't sure if the days off were due to my foot still hurting or just because I was too depressed to get out of bed.

On Saturday I dragged my hopeless and morose self out to the Arroyo to do the shortest of all of my runs, just so that one week would not have passed with zero runs. Honestly, it felt horrible. The last two times I took time off in the past few months, it actually did feel physically regenerative, with not too much loss of fitness, but this time, I think I over-expended my fitness bank account... or maybe it was because it was 3 pm and I had yet to eat or drink anything. Who knows.

45:51 for Monterrey Recovery Loop, which is a lot slower than the effort felt like, and when I got back to my bike, I felt extremely dizzy, followed by slightly nauseous, and then this overpowering feeling that I've never been so thirsty in all of my life. I waited for all of those sensations to pass before biking home. Like I said... it was horrible. The intention was that I didn't want the entire week to pass by without a single run, and that I felt like if I managed to run today, psychologically it would make it more likely that I would run tomorrow... but I think I felt even more demoralized after this run than before, if that is humanly possible.