Challenge Week

This morning was 'way gross.  No particular reason why.  It just was.  I looked at the Accuweather report from this morning (yay for weather websites that let you go back and see earlier conditions) and it was about normal, as far as gross conditions go: 80F, humidity of 87%, dew point of 76F, and a heat index of 100.  By the way, there is a generally acknowledged running guideline that any run you do when the humidity + temperature = 160F+ will be disgusting, which is pretty much the case from April to October here.  But today the icky conditions felt even more ick than normal.  It was a very sloggy four miles.  One of the only respites that I had was around mile 3.3ish, when I ran past a bunch of foliage that jutted out slightly into the sidewalk.  It rained last night and the water that had collected felt somewhat cool.  Seriously.  That was this highlight of this morning's run: slightly-not-hot rainwater.  Ugh.

Funny: last Sunday, I chose a route that went by a house that belongs to a friend (well, two friends actually that are married).  As I did, my friend was stepping out to get the papers, which is a somewhat weird coincidence.  Today, I took the same route and saw her at the corner, in her car, leaving for work.  Bizarre!  Her name is Stephanie, and I am hereby dubbing these 'Random Stephanie Encounters' (RSE).  Now that I've identified them, they will probably never happen again. 

I went closer to 8am than 9am today because I was supposed to go to a meeting at 11am for work.  Last night, I had an important realization: this is a challenging week.  Why?  Because it does not quite fit my normal routine.  I am very fortunate that I have an excellent job in the 'allowing me to train for long-distance running events' category.  While there are times when I need to be at the office at an appointed hour, for the most part, I can set my own schedule.  Actually, I chose my marathon plan based on the fact that I can train on my work-from-home days, so that I don't have to feel too much pressure about having everything wrapped up so that I can be at my desk at 9am.  And yes, I do recognize how sweet this is.  The flip side is that I do work seven days a week, which is less fun.

However, this week is a weird week.  We have meetings at unusual times.  We are having meetings almost every day.  We are having a lot of meetings, totaling, by my count, 9.5 hours -- generally I would estimate that I have more like ~2-3 hours a week (yes, I do need to be at the actual office more often than this, but we're just talking meetings here).  I'm getting stressed out about scheduling the running since it doesn't fit the normal plan.

And I realized last night that this is okay, even if I can't find a routine for this week.  There will be challenging weeks since I also have times that I need to travel.  But I'm hoping that by identifying them as challenging weeks, I will feel better about them.  By investing in this concept, I hope that it will make them less stressful.

Icky morning runs are not helping, though.

[Actually, I did not make the 11am meeting because there was a power outage and I couldn't open by automatic garage door.  This literally happened as I was preparing to go and the garage door opened 1/3rd of the way, then stopped.  If it were really an emergency, I could have opened it manually, but if  you want to come over to my stuffy garage in Florida heat/humidity to open it manually, go on right ahead.  I decided to take a pass.]