One of Those Days

We’ve all had them–I’ve certainly had my fair share, like when I set out to ride the Lake Stevens course a couple times and made it 10 miles. Or when I set out to ride 82 miles and made it about 30 and nearly froze to death. Sometimes you just have one of those days where you set out to do something and the forces combine to eff up your ess so that you have the worst day imaginable as one thing after another goes wrong. Yesterday was one of those days for me.

I had a speed run workout scheduled, so Jas and I headed to the Greenlake track on our lunch break to bust it out. The plan was to do a 20 minute warm up, then two miles all out with a five minute recovery, then 4×100 at my previous all out pace with a three minute recovery, then a 10 minute cool down. Total workout time: 1 hour. I started my warm up then began my hard effort. It sucked. Bad. My stomach was really sour and I felt like I didn’t have any speed. I stopped after one mile, figuring I’d do my recovery and then I could do another hard mile. I started my recovery time and the sour stomach went into overdrive. My easy set quickly incorporated some “awkwardly mosey over to the portapotty and unleash the fury” time (at least there were portapotties nearby — I wasn’t about to fail my #1 goal).

When my stomach quieted down, I left the portapotty and dejectedly made my way back to the track. Okay, so my two mile hard effort was kind of a bust, but at least I could do my 4×100 sets, right? I started one and had a decent lap time, then did a recovery lap. During my second lap the stomach acted up again, and once again my recovery lap included a sprint to the bathroom where I had to do the walk of shame past the same tennis players who I had just passed five minutes ago. I felt like waving and announcing, “Yes, yes, it’s me again. Yes, clearly I’m having some sort of bowel issue. Thank you for noticing. Yes, I have seen Anna Kournikova on The Biggest Loser. Uh, no, I don’t really like her more than Jillian. I mean, she kind of sucks and she’s got the crappiest team, so…you know what, speaking of ‘crappiest,’ I really gotta go. Again.”

After Wave of Number Two #2 came and went, I managed to bust out a super sad cool down mile, figuring that the workout was a complete bust considering my guts weren’t letting me run hard. Instead of 7-7.5 miles, I managed a fairly sad five. We drove home and I had some soup and some tea to try and quiet things down, then I headed to the allergist to get my weekly shot.

I needed to get a swim workout in but wasn’t sure I’d make the swim time at our gym, so later that evening after my shot I headed over to Medgar Evers to drop in on their lap swim time. When I got there, the employee recharged my parks & rec card and was about to scan it when I looked over at the pool and noticed an unusually large amount of pre-teens occupying the lanes.

Me: “Uh, is lap swim going on right now?”

Employee: “No, it’s a youth swim clinic.”

Me: “Oh…how long does that go for?”

Employee: “From now until 6:30.” Damn it all!

Me: “Does lap swim start after that?”

Employee: “Yeah, from 6:30 to 7:00.”

Oh, what the hell. 30 minutes for lap swim? Maybe the average swimmer could do my workout in that time, but Rebecca the Floating Turd was going to need about 50 to bust this out. No swimming for me.

I headed back home and thought, “Okay, the run didn’t go well, the swim didn’t happen, but I have an hour long bike workout scheduled tomorrow that I could do today” (I had been shuffling around workouts this week since Jason and I are traveling to Chicago this weekend). Jason pulled out my bike for me and I went to pump up my tires. I finished pumping up the front one, and when I removed the pump from the valve stem, it imploded into itself and my tire immediately went flat. FUCKKKKKKKKKK. Now I’ve got the saddest flat tire imaginable — an indoor trainer ride flat. Who gets these? Becca gets these.

I sighed and replaced the flat tube. By this point I was tired and in total “Fuck it” mode, so I did a pretty lazy spin while watching Teen Mom recordings from my DVR while Jason simultaneously laughed at and felt bad for me for having a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day. I ended up laughing it off with him — I mean, when three workouts go horribly awry, you gotta just roll with the punches, right? Thankfully, most of my workouts lately have gone relatively well coming off Injuryfest 2011, so I’ll take a shitty workout or two…just as long as this doesn’t become a regular thing.