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| Skinny |
So I went for a pre-breakfast walk, run, walk, dry-heave workout outside on Thursday prior to some nasty storms coming in. It was terrible. Or rather, I was terrible. Supposedly everyone who wants to cut weight before a race runs first thing in the morning on an empty stomach in order to maximize the fat-burning effects of the workout. They claim that first thing in the morning your body has no fuel to burn, so it has no choice except to burn fat. That is, unless your body is messed up like mine and then it may burn muscle instead.
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| No fat, no muscle |
So I got up and went out to give this a try. Keep in mind that I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination and I hate, hate, HATE running early in the morning, especially on a totally empty stomach. Now add to that the fact that I am having to walk a great deal prior to breaking into a run in order to get my knee warmed up enough to let me run at all and you have half a workout wasted just for the knee warm-up part.
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| Electric blue and speed walking |
I went out in my awesome electric blue running shoes. They're obnoxious and they'll blind you if you look directly at them for too long. I walked as fast as possible until, to be honest, I couldn't stand to walk anymore. My knee didn't technically indicate being ready to run. But I started running anyway. Oh, and my allergies were attacking me like mad. This was the first outdoor run I've done in a long time. Right off the bat I had to run up a steep hill. My knee complained the entire time, so I walked down the other side, which was steeper. Then I went back to running. I quickly became aware of the fact that my run pace wasn't much faster than my walk pace and I probably looked like an idiot.
Then I passed a snake.
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| You sure run slow. Why aren't you faster? Maybe I'll chase you. |
It was a tiny snake, curled up on the side of the road right at my feet as I sloooooowly ran by barely making any progress at all. At first I thought it was a piece of rope. Then I saw the head. Then it flicked its tongue and I said "oh, snake, how awesome." And I ran on, glancing behind me just in case the evil snake decided to chase me because, you know, they do that.
It didn't.
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| Here comes the sun |
My run was terrible. I felt terrible. I had no energy at all and no speed. Also, I was badly sunburned last weekend and this was the first day I had gone out into the sunlight since then. I could feel the sun hitting my burned skin and it hurt.
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| Why so serious? |
I ran to the bottom of more hills and trotted up the first hill. I thought about running on up the rest, but decided that I needed to make this an easy run, just to assure that I felt well enough to run again tomorrow. So I stopped and turned around, heading back the way I came.
Snake! Again.
Back to the first hill I climbed, and this is the steeper side. I stopped and walked the rest of the way home from there. And my God, I felt like death!
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| This is so much fun. I feel awesome. |
So, this running on an empty stomach thing, if it takes any weight off me and makes me lighter for race day, is hard. And if it doesn't take any weight off me, because lets face it, a personal trainer tried everything he could think of for a year and a half and it had NO EFFECT, then it's just a major pain in my ass. I hate it. I feel like death running with absolutely no fuel whatesoever inside of me.
And then for the rest of the day I felt like death. And I STILL hurt the next day, mostly from the sun on my burns, so much that I didn't run. Blah!
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| Next day, no run |
