99 days!!

According to my TRT countdown, I'm now less than 100 days from my first 50K. I'm also 51 days from San Diego RNR Marathon and one month and one day from college graduation :) Lots of good stuff coming up!

Today was a great day. I turned in my second paper, and am reveling in having no homework assignments hanging over my head. My thesis still needs a lot of work, but I nevertheless have 40 pages written and plenty of ideas to talk about :)

Went for a very nice run after class up on the firetrail. I felt out of shape for the beginning (the hills didn't help) but it was such a beautiful day that it was impossible not to feel great out there. It was one of those perfect bay area days, 60s temperature and crisp clear sky. From the trail I had an amazing panoramic view of berkeley, the bay, mt. tam, the golden gate, and san francisco. I felt so lucky to have been able to be out there!

With my newfound time I was finally able to get back to the gym to do strength training after work, and it was really wonderful. I walked at a slight incline on the treadmill for 2.1 miles while reading Running Times (forgot my book so I decided to buy a magazine and this seemed like the best choice), did lots of stretching and relaxing (they have a room just for stretching at the gym in one of the raquetball court rooms where the lights are off. Its really nice!). Then I did 100 crunches and 40(!) pushups :) Considering about a month ago I could barely do one, this is great progress. Granted, it was 5 sets of 8, so not 40 at once, but its still a very exciting step. Push-ups make me feel strong! Then I did my normal 6 weight lifting things. All in all spent about 2 hours there, and it was great.

I decided to celebrate having such a great day by stopping by the store and picking up some salmon. Had salmon, lots of zucchini and squash, 1/2 an avocado, and cherry tomatoes for dinner. Absolutely heavenly :)

And I get to sleep in tomorrow

Life just doesn't get much better!

First Day Back!

After no workouts since last Tuesday (save one strength training session during which I started feeling as though I was going to pass out) I headed to the gym this morning to see if I was well enough to do something active again. As per the doctor's orders, I used my albuterol inhaler this morning before heading over to the gym. Got to the locker room and started to change, only to discover that...

I forgot my shorts!!!

So, apparently a workout wasn't in the cards for the morning. I decided to use the time, since I was on campus anyways, to go to the library and get books for my thesis, and then hurried home to grab those pesky shorts before class. After my first class ended at 11, I went back to the gym, this time with all the right parts of my outfit, and got on the elliptical

I decided that since I lost all of last week that I wouldn't worry about it and would instead just treat this week as I normally would have and see how that goes. On that vein, I did my 'normal' monday rountine of an hour of cross-training. Lately I've been doing some or all of this on the stairmaster, since I've been figuring that's one of the more challenging machines for me, and would be effective for getting my uphill leg muscles working. However, since I'm not fully recovered I decided to save the stairmaster for another day and just take it easy.

After being almost inactive for 6 days, the elliptical was heavenly!!! Granted, the few coughing fits that showed up were somewhat annoying, but still, it felt great to sweat, to get my heart rate up, to just have some me time. I really really missed it.

Tomorrow will be my first run in exactly a week. I'm hoping that I didn't lose too much fitness from the time off, but I'll honestly be glad to just be running at all, even if it's a little slower. I'm still planning on running the 30k race this week, so hopefully the rest of this cold clears out in the next few days.

Still, I'm so glad to be back :)