Snow, snow, go away, come again another day (like next winter!)

Midwest springs are so cruel. You want to believe that the warm weather is here for good and that you can forget about all those past springs where it snowed sporadically through March, April, and May. And your delusion is going great (last week was gorgeously sunny and 60 degrees) and then it goes and snows and the snow essentially shits all over your delusion and brings you back to the cruel reality. Case in point: today, there are 2 inches of snow on the ground and it's about 30 outside. So sad.

Knowing that this evil snow was predicted and given other restrictions of the weekend, Tricia and I opted to do our long run yesterday and our long bike tomorrow morning when it will be dry but cold. I ended up doing yesterday's workout by myself which was good for concentrating on my running form, but no so good for how hard I pushed myself since I always run too hard when I'm by myself.

I took the bus to school, fit in the week's last swim (300m warmup, 500m swim, 200m cooldown) and then changed and did a 50 minute run home. The swim felt really good, probably the combination of having been in the pool the day before (I oddly always feel better on the second of back-to-back swim days) and not having been on my bike since Wednesday. I wasn't sure how the run would feel considering that I'd also run on Thursday and I wasn't sure how my evil hamstring would respond to back-to-back run days. The last time I tried this (with a 5 miler one day and an 8 miler the next), I managed to set my hamstring recovery back several weeks. But since clearly I don't learn from my mistakes, I thought I'd give it another try. The run actually felt great for the first 25 minutes or so. I felt really energetic and peppy, was running faster than I have been, was hitting 180 strides a minute no problem, and my hamstring felt great through about 20 minutes. I probably should have just stopped and stretched at that point, but I really wanted to hit 25 minutes before stopping so then I could just run the second 25 minutes all the way home. Probably that too wasn't the best idea. After stretching, my leg did feel better, but I started to get tired and then my leg also started to hurt which was super demoralizing. The rest of the run essentially had off-and-on leg pain and moments of extreme fatigue followed by moments of me convincing myself I felt peppy and good again. I did manage to maintain 180 strides/minute throughout the run which is good, but I wish that my leg had felt better.

I was also really surprised by how tired I felt at the end of the run. We'd done a 55 minute long run last weekend that felt fine, so I didn't anticipate that the volume would be a problem, although I'm sure the combo swim-run was a large part of being tired. Oh, and the running too fast part! Other than eating, showering, and grocery shopping, I lay on the couch for the rest of the afternoon and moaned (to myself) about how tired I was. Pretty pathetic.

The bright side of yesterday's effort is that today is a day off!!! Yippee!!! I need to stretch and do my PT and would love to go lift, but no major workout for the day which is great. Instead, it's laundry, cleaning, and lying on the couch. Oh how I love Saturday, even when there's snow.