Can You Have an “Off” Day without a Training Schedule?

I decided that today would be my off day, even though, as I have no schedule, technically every day is an off day.

I have a ton of miscellaneous things to get done during the day and then this evening, the boy is having friends over to spend the night while the girls and I will be watching “Project Runway.”

Yesterday was a lovely chat run with Cathy, followed by weights at the Townlake YMCA. They’re replaced the old weight machines with new, jazzy ones and there’s a bit of a learning curve for me…thank goodness for Crabby Old Jaws, who very kindly acts as my personal trainer. There were some giggles over user-error on my part on one machine while COJ looked like a beast on another.

On Monday, I ran approximately 10 miles in my neighborhood. I hadn’t planned on running that but the opportunity was there and I hadn’t run “long” over the weekend since I was garage sale-ing on Saturday (it was fun to sit out on the driveway at my sister-in-law’s house and watch all the runners go by but that doesn’t help me get ready for New York City Marathon).

My run was interesting; I enjoyed it immensely but I felt sluggish and heavy and was sure that I was plodding along. I was doing my usual long route over here, the one that I did whenever I needed to bust out a convenient long run on my own. I was surprised to see when I got back that I’d run it some 10–13 minutes faster than when I did it during Ironman training.

That just goes to show how tired those legs were during those IM weekends.

I’m really happy to be back to the running;  I didn’t get my fix during IM. And I am a runner at heart, a runner who also does triathlons.

I’d like to get in a swim but I have to replace my bathing suit first–the chlorine at the Northwest YMCA pool has literally eaten through it, and when I went to check out the T3 swim the other day, it began to disintegrate before my eyes!

Oh my.