Today was the last day of what has felt like an obscenely long half-term. Once again I had planned on leaving work early, but a couple of exciting things happened in the afternoon which meant that I didn't quite leave when I wanted to, as I was trying to track down various members of staff to share with them good news (I have a job interview soon, yay!). And then I decided that I was too bored to stay at work, but didn't really want to go home to an empty flat, either. So I decided to have a little drive around Essex. After about half an hour of driving down empty, narrow country lanes, I found my way back to a familiar path, and ran straight into some traffic on a normally quieter route. Turns out the major accident on the usual A-road route I take had diverted traffic onto this quieter route, and someone had had an accident here, too. Anyway as soon as I got home I prepared to run.
On my doormat was an armband for my phone whilst running that I'd ordered earlier this week (because tucking your phone into your sports bra results in yucky sweat)! I was excited to try out my new gadget.
Anyway, I loaded up runkeeper, squeezed my phone into its new, more sophisticated holder, and set off on the run.
Things were going well, except the volume on my phone suddenly decided to go really quiet during the first 3 minute recovery walk. I then spent the majority of the walk squeezing it back out of the pocket to reach the volume dials - shame I don't have a fancy set of headphones with volume control on the wire itself!
Then I started the 8-minute run. About 6 minutes in, my phone began to buzz - I have an alarm set to remind me when to take my pill. I seemed to remember the tone ringing for two minutes before it shut off, but then the alarm kept going and once I was certain I'd done more than 8 minutes of running, I decided to slow down to a walk to sort things out. I tried to keep track of how long I was walking for, but for the life of me I couldn't recall how long I was meant to be walking for during this rest. Annoyingly the podcast had paused itself whilst the alarm was going off, so I was left trying to count how long I'd been walking for, whilst hoping I'd ran for at least 8 minutes, and trying to figure out where the next run started and how long I was meant to have recovered for.
Anyway eventually I got there and began running for 5 minutes... but I started off late as I was having difficulties negotiating my new armband back onto my arm. I tried to count and decided I'd run for an additional 30 seconds after Laura told me to stop. Then 2.5 minutes into the run, I noticed my shoelace was untied!! I had to stop AGAIN and sort it out. I decided to just run for an additional minute after Laura told me to stop, which I did. I then ended up guessing the extra minute for the cool down walk.
Based on other people's experiences of week 6, I think it's safe to say that this week is cursed. I was wondering whether to repeat this evening's run, but I think I'm going to go ahead and go onto run 2 anyway, as my running app told me I'd been out of the house and exercising for 40 minutes, so I'd obviously overshot the mark somewhere along the line.
Now somebody please tell me that they can top that series of unfortunate events to make me feel better about myself!!
Week 6 Run 1
Week 6 Run 1
Week 6 Run 2
Run 1 of Week 4!!!! 
