A Letdown Leads to a Lesson

Well, I'm having a pretty good week, I guess. It started off pretty great.

Wednesday morning I had a workout though and I wasn't really happy with it afterwards. I had 2 miles hard, then 3 miles hard, and then 2 more miles hard. I'm pretty happy with the last 2 sets, but the first one was just way too slow I guess. I spent the whole day freaking out about my fitness because of it. Haley's times were a lot faster (as far as for a girl) a couple of my other teammates also seemed to have faster workouts. I've just been telling myself all summer that I'm gonna be top 5 when we get back and that I've been working really hard, but according to this workout, I haven't been working any harder than my teammates probably. On a better note, I'm glad all my teammates are having such an awesome summer training wise. That means our team is just going to be awesome this year! Can't wait! I also just can't wait to be back with everyone. Who cares about how hard I'm working right now.. I'm just going to have to pound out some good workouts when we get back and if given the opportunity to race, race my ass off.

Work has been dead, but this weekend will probably be super busy. Cowboys Vs. Aliens, Smurfs, and Crazy Stupid Love.. 3 movies from different genres. That means a lot of people are going to come!

I miss my girlfriend so much. Only like 1 more week.. or less than that now I think! We haven't even had the chance to talk much lately it feels like. We talked for a while Wednesday, but I was being dumb about that workout and wasn't in a very good mood. She did everything she could to make me feel better.. it just wasn't working haha Then yesterday I don't even know what she was doing all day. It really kinda bothered me. I texted her about 3 times all spread out over a couple hours and never got a response. It'd be one thing if I knew what she was doing.. but I didn't so I just felt pushed to the side/ignored and didn't like it. I was also probably just jealous because I'm pretty sure she was out with friends and stuff and I just wish I could be there with her! Wow, maybe I'm just clingy? haha sorry

Anyway, my whole freak out on Wednesday really made me see how I've been way to obsessed with running. For the next two weeks, I'm going to try not freaking out if my workout doesn't go as well as I had hoped or if I just don't even feel that great on a run.

I'm starting to feel a cold coming on :/ I need to go take some medicine.
Then, I'm meeting my mom and her boss for lunch at Raferty's yummmm

Have a good weekend!

My Week in Starkvegas

Sooo let's see..
I survived the 75 mile week.. and this past week was only 60. I felt like I didn't do anything haha..
I also didn't eat too healthy. I found myself everyday looking for some kind of sweet to eat. By the end of the week I was eating wayyyy too many starburst jelly beans and pretzel m&m's. yummmm. But it's starting to catch up with me. haha. Last night, I had to run after I got off work and I did not look nearly as fit as I did back in mid June. Soo I decided I'm determined to do enough push-ups and sit-ups to look fit again in the next 3 weeks before I go back to school. Oddly enough.. I didn't wake up to run this morning. I feel like a complete failure. I know I'll get it in.. I just really wish I had done it this morning. It's so much harder to make yourself go out and do it later than just getting it over with in the morning.

My sleeping schedule is so weird. I can't find a balance because sometimes I work nights soo I can't go to sleep till like midnight. Other nights I'm off and I'd like to be in bed by 10 at the latest. The nights I work though, I only get about 5-6 hours before I run so then I wind up taking excessively long naps and I'm not tired until midnight again. Now there are days like today where I got my full 8 hours, but I still feel so tired. I don't know what to do. Any suggestions?

I went to Starkville for the week and had a great time! I got to run with my coach and a teammate, rented a lot of movies, ate at my favorite restaurant there, but best of all was able to spend a lot of quality time with my awesome girlfriend.
- My run with Coach made me very confident in my fitness, while my runs with Adam made me question a little bit how hard I'm actually working. I mean, I feel like I'm doing great, but he didn't seem too blown away by my runs and he made me go even faster than I've been running. What if everyone else is running the kind of pace we were running? Oh well, just 3 more weeks till I find out!
- We rented Inception (thought it was great), Hallpass (I liked it), The Lincoln Lawyer (loved it), Black Swan (just ok), and Blue Valentine (horrible). haha I haven't watched that many movies in a long time.
- My favorite restaurant in Starkville has been Old Venice for quite a while now, but they got a new menu and changed the bread they serve. I'm not a fan. It's probably not my favorite place anymore. What I ordered was ok.. the appetizer wasn't that good to me and my girlfriend got a salad. I walked out of there paying about $40 and was pretty unhappy with it overall. Now I wish I had gone to Umi or something.

sooooo good

Sooooo this week just helped me realize how much I love my girlfriend. Can't live without her. I've missed her so much and I do already.We talk about marriage a lot. I can't wait to be married and start a family with her. On another note, I don't really think we fought at all this week! :) there were just a few times that she went a lil psycho. *Sorry babe ;) I guess I kind of called her out for her restricting habits and she didn't like it.. She knows better, though! It was really frustrating to watch her all week eat oatmeal, a smoothie, and salad. I just don't understand that. I'm noticing that when she struggles, I struggle, and we struggle in our relationship. It's very... exhausting in a way. I can't wait for the day when food isn't an issue. I don't want it in our life or in our family's life when we're older. Wish there was something I could do.

Well, I think this is a little shorter than the last one. haha sorry about that!
Hope everyone has a great start to the week!

48 hours from Hell

So... last weekend was ridiculous!
Last week's mileage was 75 which is pretty close to if not the highest mileage I've ever done in a week! And boy was I tired by the end.

So Wednesday night I probably got my usual 5-6 hours of sleep (not enough). I woke up at 5:30 to do my 6 miles. I finished the final season of 24 :( I took about a 3 hour nap. Then I had another 4 mile run at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Of course it was about 105 degrees. ugh. Then I got ready and went into work. 5-close. I work at a local movie theater and of course we did a midnight show for Harry Potter. We sold out of 9 screens. That's over 1600 people. Needless to say it was absolutely ridiculous. It started out not so bad, but by 10:30 we were getting dominated in the concession stand. I had to get off my register and start doing all the things that needed to be done for the people taking orders. We were running out of popcorn, drink cups, pretzels, hot dogs, lids.. pretty much everything in that concession stand was running low. As a supervisor, it's my job to make sure that everything is stocked and we don't run out. When we're that busy, that means running around the place doing 3892053 different things. I saw some friends there, but there was no way I could stop and talk.

This isn't even that good of a picture to describe it. 

I guess it was lines about that long all night.. but towards the end it was so crowded you couldn't see the floor like that. It was packed in there. 

Sometime around 11:00, I remember thinking we still have 1 more hour before the movie starts and everyone will just go sit still. I was sweating really bad because I was running around.. it was really bad and I felt so gross at the end of the night. Also, around 11:00, our drink machine stopped working in out main concession stand. Couldn't fill people's cups up. Do you know how bad that is? Out of 1600+ people, just imagine how many wanted a drink.. I'm just glad I wasn't on the register having to tell people they weren't working. We opened our side concession stands, but they don't have all the drinks the main ones do.. plus it's just real inconvenience. Oh well. There was nothing else we could do. Finally about 10 after midnight we stopped getting customers. I've seriously never experienced anything like that in my 4 years of working there. After all the people stopped coming, it was time to close down. For me, that means counting all of the items we sell. Yeah, we do inventory every night. It sucks. We were finally done around 1:30, but my manger needed some people to stay until the movie got out to help collect 3D glasses and clean the theaters a little.. at least pick up drinks and buckets of popcorn.
I didn't leave until 2:45ish.

At this point I knew that if I wanted to wake up and do my 10 miles at 5:30.. I most likely would not wake up with only like 2 and a half hours of sleep.. so I just decided to go ahead and run. I ran from about 3:00-4:00 in the morning. It was actually a really good run, I was just super tired. I got in bed at about 5:30 AM and slept till around 10:30. I had to be at work Friday at 12. I worked for 12 hours Friday. It was miserable. 12 pm to 12 am. I was so tired of the place by the end of the day. I almost quit twice that day. The managers were just being real bitches *excuse my language haha. But I work my ass off for that place.. and especially was this weekend. I was doing everything I could and better than anyone else up there can. So to be given the attitude I was or treated the way they were treating me did not go over well with me. Also.. the stupid high schoolers I work with like to talk trash behind my back for some reason.. They're so dumb and I was not in the mood to deal with their shit while working a double. By the end of the day, I was just thinking "why have I worked my ass of for a place for 4 years in a supervisor position only getting minimum wage?!?! walk out now and see how much better you'll feel and how shocked everyone will be" It certainly would have made a statement.. but in all actuality I love that place. I love the people and they love me.. we were just all having a really long and hard weekend. I'm going to be getting free movies for the rest of my life.. soooo I can handle a few rough weekends I guess.

Well, I got off at midnight and slept till about 5:30 before I had to get up and going for my long run. 15 miles. I started off not really knowing if I could physically do it. My legs and whole body actually was just so tired. After about 2-3 miles I was just thinking "you still have 12-13 left.. ahhhhhh" When I finally got to the half way mark.. I was so relieved.. except I knew I had to push myself harder the second half to get the quality run in I wanted. Surprisingly, I was feeling really strong the last 7 miles and it wound up being a really good run. Sooooo anyway, those 2 days just sucked all around.
Work wasn't too bad Saturday or Sunday because everyone had seen Harry Potter by that time.

I've been meaning to do this post all week.. but I've just been busy. This has been a really good week! I'll try to post again during the weekend with an update on this week because I'm in Starkville visiting my amazing girlfriend and it's been awesome so far sooooo I'll talk about that in the next post!

We're almost to the weekend. We can make it! haha

Tired

I'm having one of those days..
I don't really feel like moving or talking. I want to sleep and watch 24.
I really should get out of this mood though.. I guess I'm not in a very friendly state, but I shouldn't be taking it out on others.

I ran 14 miles this morning. It was super hard. I feel like it shouldn't have been that hard. I still have to increase my mileage by 10 miles before I reach my max. Not sure how this is going to go over feeling like I did this morning. I'm going to take next week a little easier. I went 3 weeks pretty hard and 1 easy for the last cycle and this one I'm going to do 2 hard 1 easy and then the last 1 a little harder I think. After talking to my super fast girlfriend about her run this morning, it made me feel even a little worse about my run. She was 17th at nationals in the 10k.. so she is really really good, but her run was just barely slower than mine. I just feel like if I want to be a really fast guy.. I should be running even faster. She assures me I'm running really strong and probably faster than most of my teammates. I'm just going to spend the next week focussing on getting the mileage in and not so much on pace.

I've watched like 9 episodes of 24 in the past 24 hours. It's sooo addicting and I have nothing else to do.

I finished my nutrition class last night! I got a 91 on the test which I wasn't too happy with, but I still got a 95 for the class! I can deal with that!

I overindulged myself last night. My family and I went to The American Cafe last night. I wanted pasta, but I got like the cheesiest one. I was able to pick off most of the cheese, but then of course I saw they had a peanut butter ice cream pie. I wound up eating most of it by myself and it was huge. I just kept thinking that I was running 14 miles in the morning and I needed all the food I could get and that tasted SO good. I shouldn't have gotten that, though. I should have waited till I was home and eaten something else. Oh well, it's in the past. I haven't done any circuit work in a week or 2.. starting to lose whatever abs I was getting :/ My peanut butter intake certainly isn't helping! haha

I have to go in to work at 5. Hope I'm awake and ready to sell some large drinks! (There's a contest going on to sell large drinks. Each drink has a point value and the first 2 people to 3500 points get $50. Right now I'm in the lead by about 400 points and I'm at 2476 I think.. sooo I'm almost there and with Harry Potter coming out soon we're going to be so busy!)

Well.. I'm going to get back to my show.
Hope everyone has a good weekend!

Summer in a nutshell

Pretty much all I do every day is run, eat, nap, watch 24, maybe do some homework for my Nutrition class, and work! I pretty much love all these things so I don't really care that I don't have much of a social life outside of these things haha. I know, it's sad.

Such a great show. I've watched 6 seasons in about a month and a half.

Each episodes is about 45 minutes long and there are 24 episodes in a season.

If you haven't seen it, you need to. It's addicting.

Well obviously I haven't blogged in a long time.. I guess I just thought no one ever read it or that I just didn't have very important things to say. I kinda want to use this as either a training log for my running or maybe just a way to share with people the things I learn as I grow in my faith. But I guess I feel like I haven't learned too much to grow in my faith.. which needs to change and I keep a running log on paper sooo doing it twice seems kind of pointless and I don't even know that people really would be interested to hear about my training. Most of this summer I haven't even really wanted people to know about my training..

I guess I'll address my running, though. This summer has been really intense so far. I want to be really good this year and so I'm taking all my runs pretty serious. I don't run hard every day, but I just stay focussed. On aerobic development runs, I start off at my easy pace, but the last half I get my legs going and by the end I'm running 6:00 pace. Apparently this is faster than some of my teammates have been running. I'm not sure though because none of them ever talk about paces.. Everyone just says they are having pretty solid runs. I wish I knew what they were really up to. Are they working hard at all? Are they working as hard as me? Are they running faster than me? I just can't wait to see where I stand on this team because I haven't really known since November where I stand. Anyways, some days I feel really tired and my legs feel super heavy and it makes me wonder if I can keep this up until November. I mean, that is a long way away. I start thinking about the really hard workouts we're going to be doing when we get down to school and I wonder how my legs are going to hold up if they're already this tired. I guess I'll manage. I also wonder how I'm supposed to do 10 mile tempos at 5:20 pace if I can't even do 10 miles under 6 minute pace without being pretty shot.  I know it's early and I'm not supposed to be there yet, but I feel like I'm running a lot faster than I ever have before so I'm excited to see what kind of season I'm going to have. Hopefully my hard work pays off!

Yesterday, me and my girlfriend Haley were looking at the stats on our blogs. Although I thought no one reads this thing, I guess quite a few people that read her blog tend to find mine and see what I'm up to. haha soooo Hi all of Haley's followers :) I'll try to blog more so that you can get both sides of our relationship or at least see more of the real me and not just all the nice things she says about me :)