Two nights of early to bed resulted in this week’s sign that the apocalypse is upon us: namely, that I woke up early, then actually GOT OUT OF BED and did my workout BEFORE work.  Kiss your loved ones, folks, the end of the world is nigh.

40-minutes on the bike:

I’m only posting this map shot because for the first time I noticed that there is supposedly and airport damn close to my route.

Didn’t feel great on this run, combination of being rushed getting out the door and being a little underhydrated.  Gonna work on consistently drinking more water since we’re getting into the hot season and I can’t walk from my car to the office without breaking a sweat.  Never mind going for a 5-mile run.

I’m also going to start making 5-miles my baseline easy run again instead of the four I have been doing lately.

Also, before my run I knocked out my planned pushup workout.  Felt really good.  Much stronger than when I did the same workout the first time through the program.  Very encouraging.  The final set was supposed to 45(+) and I did 50.  Probably could have done a few more but I was in a hurry to get to my run.

For the first time in a long time.  Skipped my pushups but honestly I’m sleep deprived enough that I don’t really care.  I’ll knock them out tomorrow.

I played around with my breathing tonight.  Usually I just breath every third stroke but tonight I did some 5-breath laps and some 4-breath laps.  Nothing structured, just playing around.  I’m not sure if it had any effect but I’m going to compare these charts from tonight:

With the charts that I usually get from swimming and see if there’s any difference.  Probably not but it might at least force me to learn something about the damn things.

Felt good.  Except for this:

Feels like 97.  At 9pm.  In the pitch dark.  Yuck.

Oh, and here’s a bonus graph since I’m boycotting the map pictures until I get a new one:

Check out this video I found over on the Steve in a Speedo blog:

I love videos like this.  The question I ask myself when I see stuff like this is whether she’d have won WITHOUT the fall.  Would she have had the adrenaline, the anger, the fire to really push or would she have gotten caught up in the strategy and gamesmanship of the run and maybe waited too long for her kick?  You never know but it’s just awesome to watch.

I’m just barely hanging on by the skin of my teeth to anything resembling a workout routine and my self-respect with regard to exercise and self-discipline.  I have a ton of excuses and I’m planning to write up a confession/way to avoid them in the future post but that will probably have to wait until sometime this coming week.

Tonight I’m going to post my run from yesterday – very cool run, proud I made myself do it – and confess that I totally skipped any kind of workout today for absolutely no reason.  Bad inertia.  [Shrug.]

The Girlfriend and I went up to Bangkok on Friday night because she was flying out at 0700 Saturday morning.  Rather than get up at 0300 to drive up there we used a free night certificate I had laying around to stay at the JW Marriott Bangkok.  It made for a nice evening in Bankok, a reasonable wake-up call, a short 30-minute trip to the airport and a chance for me to do a run in Bangkok with a place to go back to and shower, change and have breakfast before checking out and heading home.

It was an interesting and fun run and a cool route.  I’m going to add it to the growing list of run reports in the queue because it’s late here and I’m getting ready for bed.  Besides, I still haven’t found my camera’s download cable to put the pictures I took in.  For now here’s the basic data that I inputed into Garmin Connect (did I mention I forgot my Garmin?) and a snapshot of the route.

That’s a 9:30 pace, by the way.  For some reason Garmin Connect didn’t calculate it from my data and wouldn’t let me input it manually.  I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before but I couldn’t figure it out this time.  No bid deal.  Kind of.

Wore my FiveFingers today for the first time in a while.  I still like them but there is some seam related chafing.  But my feet and ankles are pretty well adapted to them from the period when I was wearing them almost exclusively during a high frequency training period.  Now I can put them on once or twice a month and not have any soreness or tightness in my feet or ankles.  I’m thinking about maybe trying out a pair of New Balance Minimus shoes, split the difference between the FiveFingers and the traditional running shoes.

This was supposed to be a max effort test.  I guess that’s why the app wanted me to restart on week 3, so I’d have two weeks of work before another test.  Oh, well.  I went ahead and skipped that and went straight on to the next training day.  It was a tough one.  Much harder than W4D3’s.  But I did it straight with no added rest time above or beyond the scheduled intervals.

Recognize this route?

Sigh.  Yeah, me too.  There is something to be said for routine and there is something to be said for having a go to run route.  But this route is not scenic or pleasant.  The traffic is not ideal and it’s still the best route anywhere within pedestrian starting distance from my front door.

Anyway, did a nice easy four miles tonight.  Gotta grease the groove again and get back into a strong routine.