Week 6, Day 1

Whew. What a busy (and productive) day. I went and installed myself at the best coffee shop on campus (the Donkey) at 7 o'clock this morning in order to crank out all ten pages of my English final (due tmw at 4) and the last page of my 10-page French final (due tmw at noon). Getting there while it was still dark outside was an interesting experience, since Donkey stays open 24/7 (literally) during finals week, there were some interesting characters this at 7am. My favorites were the two people crashed on the couches upstairs 100% sleeping. Not "I dozed off" sleeping, but really sleeping. One guy even had an alarm set that went off at 8am. He promptly turned it off and went back to sleep. Long story short, today was a long and tedious day, but I finished the work and spent all day looking forward to tonight's run after sitting on my bum for 12 hours. See? On the left is a picture of my little study nook @ the coffee shop. It looks like I moved in. On the right, you have a little close up of all the essentials to get through the morning: the adorable feet lamp on my table (It has on blue nailpolish), a WW 1-pt bar, and my coffee.

Anyways, by the time Jon picked me up and we got changed (I substituted a zip up hoodie for the evil jacket), it was after 8 by the time we got running and I have to say the first 5 minute jog was actually pretty rough. My knees were hurting and I was feeling pretty bad about feeling so bad since I'd done so well yesterday. At one point during the run, the back of my right shoulder started to hurt, perhaps I was keeping my arms too tight? But, thankfully that too went away. After doing some blog catch up today, I paid closer attention to my stride tonight. I noticed that if I run on the balls (ish) of my feet or at least focus on hitting up front, my knees seem to hurt a bit less, but I find that stride kind of difficult to maintain, especially as I get tired.

Thankfully, I managed to make it through the podcast, and, as always, spent the rest of my time listening to my own music. One of the biggest benefits with running with Jon (well, at the same time as Jon anyways) is that he always runs for at least an hour, so I push myself to keep going/doing stuff as long as he's working out as well. Tonight, since we were forced to go up and back a few times since only 1.5 miles of the bikepath is lit up at night, we kept passing each other, which was fun. More importantly, I decided to try for another 20-minute jog. At about 18 minutes, Jon said he was going to stop when he got back to the bridge, so I turned around. So as to not keep him waiting too long, I thought I'd try to run at least until 25 minutes... then 30... and then the end. By the time I reached him, I'd jogged for 32 minutes (slowly) and finished a little under 6 miles total. I'm feeling really good about it and I stretched out a lot, but now, I'm off to finish my edits and massage my so-tight-they're-painful calves and go to bed. Night!