Mid-training crisis

This is the 11th week of my marathon training program, which means that I am officially half way there. However, instead of being excited, I’ve been kind of in a rut this week. I’ve had all day long meetings at work for the past three days, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner were catered. So, every day I’ve been stuck in a room for 10 hours surrounded by scones, donuts, cinnamon rolls, popcorn, and cookies. The dinner menu definitely had healthier options, but who has enough willpower to choose steamed green beans when you have four cheese mac&cheese (with smoked Gouda!) available to you?! I am only human. So, in the past three days, I’ve gained 3 lbs, and I’ve gotten severely dehydrated from all the sodium consumed during the day and alcohol consumed at dinner. It seems awfully unfair that it can take you 3 weeks to lose the weight and just 3 days to gain it all back.

I didn’t do my Monday 30 minute recovery run because I was still too beaten up from this weekend. Tuesdays are usually the group run nights. However, because of my work schedule, I had to run by myself. We were supposed to be doing hill training, and since the hills are not easily found close to my office, I had to do 5 miles on a treadmill (hill setting with the incline set at around 11-13%). It was absolutely miserable. Then, the work dinner ended up lasting almost till midnight, so this morning I woke up feeling tired from not enough sleep, sore from the treadmill, and still bloated from all the food and alcohol (bread and butter, crab cakes, calamari, more bread and butter, steak, baked potato, mac&cheese, more bread and butter, martini, wine, creme brulee, more bread and butter, oy 😦 ) Needless to say, I didn’t have the energy to run this morning, so I still need to do it tonight.

I feel pretty defeated right now, as if the past three days have somehow undermined all the hard work from the previous 11 weeks. In addition, I’ve gotten my first glimpse of my work calendar for October and November, and it looks like sleep is going to be a scarce commodity. So, I can’t help but wonder if I’m still going to be able to pull this off. I know that this mood is not going to last too long and that I just need to get all the bad stuff out of my system and my routine back on track. But today I just feel like whining and moping.