According to my training schedule, Sundays are 'long, steady run' days. These are easily the longest jaunts of the week, sometime almost double any distance I've run from Monday to Saturday. While the duration of these workouts provides the most obvious challenge, the real difficulty lies in the fact that they take place on, well, Sundays.
This means I'm usually recovering from some form of excess, which you might guess is not the ideal foundation for a day that tests the limits of your physical and mental faculties. But Sunday is something of a holy sabbath for runners, with all manner of races, training and general rigour taking place on what is presumably the most laid-back day of the week. The marathon I'm attempting takes place on - you guessed it - Sunday, April 26th.
Through sheer necessity, I've started to adapt. Since I'm not yet willing to make my Saturdays totally intoxicant-free (though this will have to happen at some point), I've been tapering them and their respective Sunday legacies down to moderate levels. At the same time, I have invented a Sunday morning routine that gets me from 'largely dead to the world' to 'ready to run 20k.'
1. Wake up, drink two Throbbies of water (I bring the entire Brita bedside the night before. 'Throbbie' is the hilarious nickname of my 700ml water vessel)
2. Eat a mountain of oatmeal. It soaks up any leftover sludge in your stomach, digests easily and provides a heap of soon-to-be-burned calories
3. Don't drink a double espresso. This is nearly impossible and runs against all morning instincts. But water retention is too key.
4. Clean up the apartment. Besides giving time for food to digest and water to absorb, there is some psychological importance to having things in order before I head out. Strange, I know.
5. Shave and shower. It may seem counter-intuitive to shower before I sweat out pounds of water during my run, but for that exact reason you want to try and shower off the previous night's essence. Out of Golden Rule respect for others at the gym, it will limit my bad smell radius
6. Blast hype tracks. This is the final step, and a general clearing house for musical guilty pleasures. By the time I play myself out of the house to something like Lil' Wayne, the previous night is a distant memory and I'm ready.
3 comments:
Throbbie is the grossest nickname ever.
Gross?! I'd say fitting. As they say: 'Don't bite the Throbbie that hydrates you.'
Ughh, I hate the no coffee rule. On days I run, which is certainly not every day, I try not to drink coffee beforehand. It's hard. Sometimes I do it anyway and end up with a faster heartrate and really thirsty. But sometimes, for that caffeine jolt, it's worth it.
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