Balancing Act

This week has been a clear demonstration of the difficult part of balancing training when things like work commitments and social commitments get in the way. On Monday I had planned to swim in the evening after work. I had my sights set on it and even convinced a friend to go with me. Then as the day progressed, I got pulled into working on a mini proposal with a deadline of that evening. The coworker that got me involved thought everyone was pretty much done and it would just a matter of finalizing and compiling things, but proposals work by their own set of laws of physics and time, and things that should be done quickly will take hours longer. Long story short, I didn't leave the office until 10pm, so I did not swim. I then had the bright idea that I would try to wake up early the next day to swim, but who am I fooling here, I suck at waking up early. So after a battle between me and the snooze button, I did not make it to the pool. 

And then Tuesday after work, I had a social commitment instead of a work out. A friend from college was in town and thus I had to fulfill my duties as a gracious host to our nation's capitol. I took him to eat tapas and then enjoy some mint juleps from a very DC establishment filled with people in power suits possibly engaged in bar-based behind the scenes deal making. 

So although I am losing this battle verses training so far this week, I shall not be deterred! This evening, I did my first track work out... well, kind of. Since it is a high school track, they had some sort of sporting event, so we couldn't actually use the track, but used a trail near by to do a track-like workout. Adam finally succeeded in convincing me to join him and his friends from DC Road Runners on their weekly track work. The plan was 3 minutes on, 2 minutes off... 3 minutes trying to go fast/race pace-ish and 2 minutes slowly recovering. The group was small, but one guy had just recently done a marathon and was in recovery mode, so he was nice enough to keep me company since my general pace is pretty slow for a group of runners. In total I ran 5 miles including the warm up and cool down in total of 52 minutes. I need to get more savvy about using my garmin watch more effectively for these sorts of workouts, but from what I could tell, the first couple of "ons" were around high 8 or low 9 minute/miles. I think we did about 5 of the on-off combos. I need to learn to keep a more consistent pace and not fade out during a workout. But I was really happy I did the workout and was amazed at how quickly the time and distance flew by. Tonight helped me gain some confidence to make track workouts a more regular occurrence, and as I learn the workouts, my paces, and how to use my garmin to get better data, I'll also be able to describe them more eloquently.