I still ****ing hate yoga

This week, between being beaten up pretty badly by last week, and wanting to have a stronger long-run training day, I ditched some of my "junk miles" and ended up with mileage in the low 70s rather than 80s. Here is what I ended up running:

Monday: 5.5 easy
Tuesday: 4x1 mile at 6:00 pace on the dreadmill
Wednesday: 4.5 AM/ 8 PM
Thursday: AM 5 x 1k at 3:33 pace/ PM 4 miles
Friday: 6 easy
Saturday: Spring Thaw, 20 miles, 13x800 at MP (6:30-6:40), 800 "easy", averaged 6:59 pace
Sunday: Some number of easy miles

Monday was a prime example of something I've noticed a lot lately. The amount of quality training expected from me has forced my already-slow easy days (formerly, roughly 8:00 pace) into 8:30+ slogs of misery. Don't get me wrong: I appreciate not always having to run hard. However, my easy days have started to feel harder than the quality days, with heavy, fatigued legs, worry about working too hard during them, worrying about overtraining, worry about the previous and next workout, etc, etc.

Anyway, Tuesday I was excited to do something faster, until around 4:45 before practice. That's when I began to have sharp, stabbing pain in my abdomen. I biked home, hoping this just stemmed from my crappy posture at my desk all day, and that some light movement would make it go away. Unfortunately for me, my stomach felt worse, not better, as the time before Hounds passed. I drove to practice, put on running clothes, and realized there was absolutely no way I could even run easy, let alone run mile repeats in the snow and wind. So, I went back home, laid in bed, and hugged my pillow for about an hour. I stood up to get a glass of water, and suddenly burped 5 or 6 times in a row, and realized that I felt totally better. It was now 7:30 pm, and the weather outside sucked. So, I went back to CMU and did mile repeats on the dreadmill. As per usual, the tiny girl walking on the treadmill next to mile looked visibly uneasy about my use of the machine just next to hers. I could almost hear her train of thought. This is what I imagined her saying to herself.

"Oh, my God! What is that noise?! Jesus, what is that girl doing on that machine?! She is shaking the entire panel with every step she takes! There's sweat, everywhere! Is she going to sweat on me? Break the machine? I didn't even know these machines went faster than 10:00/mile! Did she just take off her shirt and start running in a sports bra?!"

Perhaps this is a bit of an exaggeration, but the evil glares she kept casting on me suggest this was the general sentiment she had about my workout. Anyway, I was making other patrons of the gym angry by using more than the 25 minutes allowed to any one person at a time, so I only did 4x1 mile rather than 5. On the plus side, this allowed me to meet up with the Hounds for pizza :)

By Thursday, I still didn't feel like my legs were fresh enough to do a workout. This was unfortunate, especially given that L and I had agreed to go to the 7:00 am session on the indoor track to run our 1ks. I had also been having some trouble sleeping (that night in particular, I only slept about 4.5 hours). We were both grumpy and tired and not really recovered from Tuesday. I managed to eek out 5 1ks at 3:33 (the last one was 3:35, I guess), but each and every one was a struggle. I didn't do the last one, because I really wanted to be fresh for Saturday's marathon-specific workout.

Saturday was the Spring Thaw "race". It consists of a 5-mile loop, which people run 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 times to finish their desired distance. I had elected to do the 20 as a workout, with a bunch of marathon paced 800s sprinkled throughout the second half. After the first loop, I knew I was going to be all alone and bored if I didn't start early on the speedwork. So, for the next two laps, I did 800 at 6:30-6:40 pace, 800 easy. On the last loop, I played around with speed too, but not as consistently as on the 2nd and 3rd laps. I ended up averaging a 6:59 pace, which I guess means my "easy" running wasn't all that easy. I felt pretty good throughout, though I didn't really fuel enough throughout or after the run (one gu at 6 miles, about 60-70 calories of corn water at 10 miles). The Shamrock Shakes that we stopped for on the way home were much tastier than usual as a result.

Sunday, I woke up feeling like I needed to move in some way other than running. I really wanted a massage or something, but, being a grad student who is cheap and lazy, this option didn't actually seem that appealing. I knew what I needed: to stretch, or swim, or something. School/gym seemed far away. After some thinking, I remembered that someone had mentioned a runner-specific yoga class that was held on Sunday mornings. For those of you who don't know this, I hate yoga. A lot. Enough so that I got the Hounds "annual" "I f***ing hate yoga" award for 2012. I try it once every few years, just to make sure I hate it as much as I seem to remember, and to refuel my impassioned rants about it. So, I decided that since all the various parts of my body were begging me to do something besides running, I would go. "What's the harm? It's free, half a mile from my house, and I can always just leave if I want to. Maybe it'll actually feel good to move myself in some non-running way," I thought.

So I put on some running tights and a t-shirt depicting my favorite local band (Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous). I walked up to Walnut street carrying my pilates mat, wearing a hoodie to hide my face so no one would recognize me. I walked into what might be my least favorite entity in all of commercialism (yes, more than WalMart): Lululemon. My hatred for LLL comes from three sources. One, as I mentioned, I hate yoga, and this is an epicenter for yoga. Two, I'm not a big fan of gross consumption and the culture surrounding our constant "need" to buy crap. Three, yoga's "ideals" seem to be very much about (some new-age, hippy-dippy bullshit) and also something bigger than consumerism. Somehow, LLL manages to combine 2 things I hate very much that seem to be at odds with one another.

Anyway, the class was free, so I didn't feel like showing up was an immediate affront to my moral code. Two minutes after the class start time, the instructor walked up to the front of the room and locked the door. "Oh, no!", I thought. "I was sort of joking about just leaving if I hated this class, but now that I don't have that option, I feel like I've been imprisoned in this hellhole of yoga!"

The instructor had us lie down on our backs, with our knees touching. As soon as I put my knees together, one of my hips started screaming in pain. I shifted slightly, and my whole back or torso or something popped, and I immediately felt somewhat better. But not without the whole class looking around for what made that noise 10 seconds into was was supposed to be a resting position. The rest of the class felt physically better than other yoga classes I'd been to: mostly because I was tuning out what the instructor said, I could avoid the whole "paying attention to your body" nonsense that usually makes me feel nauseous and uncomfortable. I think my ability to ignore my body is what has made me a reasonably OK distance runner. When my body is angry during activity, I tend to ignore it. I don't think about all the little muscles and the physical processes going on to make my body function. If I did, I would stop torturing my body the way I do, and I happen to like the torture I call training and racing. Anyway, the times I would listen to the instructor, and think about my body, I would start to get nauseous again and work on tuning her out, and feel much better.

Towards the end of the class, there was increasingly more of the new-age, hippy-dippy bullshit that I hate most about yoga. Things about "intentions", and "energy", and all of that. And even a reading from some text that told us something about how to be peaceful, you should care about being happy more than about being right, and to let everyone else be right, and just be happy. And then maybe those people who you let be right will like you better for letting them be right. And even if they don't, you get to be happy knowing you let them be right.

Yeah. Basically, this seemed like a bunch of self-righteous nonsense about "letting others be right", only so you can feel superior and know you deserve more praise than they do: you are, in fact "in the right" even if you aren't right. Puke. This, and the other hippy-dippy bullshit, is why I hate yoga. Oh, right, and the idiotic "Ohmmmm" and "Namaste" they think it's so cool to end the class with.

So I figured out what I'd actually like as a yoga proxy. I would like an hour class of guided stretching. You can tell me what to do with my body, but don't ask me to "dedicate the practice" to something other than my hamstrings. Don't tell me to "feel good energy", or how to be a better person. If I wanted that, I'd go to something religious. What I'm actually looking for is something purely physical :)

All in all, the training week was a good one. I was glad I ditched the second easy run that was supposed to happen Friday, and glad a few miles were cut here and there due to time constraints because I felt much better during my long run this week than last. On to next week!