Hard Tuesday

My Tuesdays this semester are heavily scheduled, in my generally-not-so-scheduled work life--I teach class from 9-10:20 and lab from 1-4:50.  Normally I can use the time in between, at least in part, to prep for the lab.  Normally I also do a hard running workout on Tuesdays, and I leave the house before anyone gets up to do that before work.  But today was my daughter's picture day at school, so I had to stay home to help her with her hair.  (Although at the end of the day, she informed me that she'd had to adjust her ponytails anyway, because I made them too high.  It is a good sign that it is finally dawning on her that I am not so good at doing hair.  Hence my own short haircut.)

So after the first class and a meeting, I headed out to fit in the track workout before lab.  And let me just pause here and note that I appreciate the flexibility of a job that lets me do this.  I work a lot of hours at night, but no one bothers me if I head out to do a track workout at 11:15.  And wow, what a workout!

I had 6 800's at what I think is optimistically 5K pace--like the 5K pace I dream about when I'm bored on a long run.  Only when I dream about it, it doesn't hurt quite as much as this did.  I had short rest (200 jog), except for after the 4th one, when my coach gifted me a 400 jog, and I believe I set a new record for slowest 400 ever jogged.  I managed to make the pace, plus or minus a couple seconds, each time.  And at the end I felt that I'm-about-to-throw-up thing I feel at the end of races.

I was sort of relieved about that, actually, because one of my favorite bloggers, Steve in a Speedo, recently posted a back and forth with his coach about just this--how if you're not feeling that bad, you're not working hard enough.  I started to feel inadequate, since I couldn't remember feeling that bad in a workout for a long time.  But now that I nearly barfed on my shoes today, I feel all happy again.  Funny how that works.

And then I got to go teach lab for four hours, which was probably good for my legs (no sitting down), but was a little exhausting.  We started out by going down to the pond on campus to measure dissolved oxygen content, and when I bent over to take my reading, I nearly passed out when I stood back up.  Still, as a chemist who spends most of her experimental life in basement rooms looking at instruments, it was fun to do a little outside chemistry.  Plus our experiment involved solutions changing colors, and really, nothing makes you feel like a chemist quite like color changes.