We did something bad.
Are you ready for it? We skipped our Saturday run. I know, I know it’s only the second week of marathon training, but it’s ok, we’re just gonna shake it off. The situation was delicate, to say the least.
We began week two with 3 hot and humid miles on Tuesday (the temperature was 74 degrees with 94% humidity at 5am) and 3 amazingly cool miles on Thursday. The 60-degree temperatures at the end of the week let us spontaneously play with speed a little bit; we unintentionally did a progression/negative split run (call it what you want – it was a great run!) with a mile average of 9:58, something we haven’t done in a while due to the summer weather conditions. And we’ve been finishing all our runs on a hill (the NYC Marathon has a big reputation for hills).
Since starting to work in the city, I’ve come to realize that I can’t stay out quite as late as I used to and then turnaround the next morning and go back into the city. The current commute and mostly unreliable train service (I’m looking at you, NJ Transit…this is why we can’t have nice things) make it unbearable. When we schedule shows, drinks, dinner plans, etc. we try to do it on Friday nights so that we don’t have that quick turnaround the next day. Luckily, our rest days fall on Fridays and this past week we had plans with Taylor Swift!
Her Reputation Tour stopped at Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford and we went to the first night of her three New Jersey concerts. This was the first time Connor and I were seeing her in concert and let me tell you, she puts on a hell of a show! The weather was perfect, we were treated to an acoustic version of “Welcome to New York”, and simply had a great time.
We bolted out right after the concert ended to catch the first train to Secaucus so we could make a connection to get us to Princeton. Well…in typical NJ Transit fashion, our connecting train from New York was 45 minutes late, so we didn’t get back home until after 1am. When you’re used to going to bed before 10:30pm most nights (and waking up before 5am on running days), being out past 1am really takes a toll!
Later Saturday morning we both woke up utterly sluggish and exhausted. We decided to skip our 4-mile run in favor of grocery shopping, a nap, relaxing, catching up on The Handmaid’s Tale, and preparing for Sunday’s 7-miler (which went very well!).
I’m hopeful that we won’t find ourselves in more situations where we’d skip the short runs, but at the same time, running on fumes won’t do us any good either. Planning ahead so that we can be flexible when we need to is our MO for training; we’ve got our eyes on the end game.
Tall Girl in a Small State 
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