This is how my day started today. At 6:25am, we had a 4.4 magnitude earthquake to wake us up in the Los Angeles area. This all happened a full 35 minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off. Argh! Earthquakes this small are just enough to be noticed, but not large enough to do much damage. My apartment shook pretty good for a few seconds. It was the sound of the windows rattling that woke me up. If you’ve lived in LA as long as I have, you’ve heard so much about the long overdue “big one” that almost every time the earth shakes you can’t help but wonder. Once the earth stops moving, then, you head over to the television to see how big (or small) the earthquake was. Also, you head to the television to make sure it was actually an earthquake and not something else. What a way to wake up!

As for my week of workouts, it was my best of the entire year thus far! That’s the good news. I completed 4 workouts this week as the graph above (from Map My Run) shows.

From my Nike Plus app, you can see that three of those workouts were runs. It was good to be able to finish 3 runs and get back up to 6 mile training runs. The bad news of the week was that, even though I did get back out and was completing the workouts, I still fell one workout at the gym short of my goal for the week. Boy is it hard to make 5 workouts.

Another bummer was Saturday’s run. I finished 6.20 miles out of the 9 I wanted to finish. It was another hot weekend in LA. I really tried to get out the door early on Saturday. However, when I woke up, my body was having none of it. I was so tired getting out of bed that I almost just decided to do nothing. However, I forced myself out of bed and had my typical pre-run breakfast. After eating, I gave myself time to digest the food. That’s where the tiredness really showed itself. I was slow in getting ready to get out the door. Then, when I did get out, I drove over to the Rose Bowl to run in the Rose Bowl loop. However, upon arrival, I saw that there was a race going on. So, traffic was diverted. By the time I got back home is was around 9:30am! On a day where the highs were forecasted to be in the mid to upper 80’s, it felt almost too late to start a 9 mile run. In spite of the lateness, I decided to try out this 6 mile route I have mapped out on Map My Run and add to that my usual 3 mile loop around where I live. It seemed like a good plan and I was prepared for it to be slow because of the heat.

The first few miles went alright. I was running along at a decent speed. However, this was a difficult run right from the first mile. I was frustrated with starting so late and not getting to run in a place with no traffic lights to slow me down. It was warm outside and I knew it would only get warmer. So many distracting thoughts. By the end of mile 2, I thought I had moved beyond that. However, the first 2 miles ended up giving me the most shade to run in. In the third mile, faced with more sun, I was ready to call it a day. I walked a good portion of it and felt completely out of rhythm. By the end of the third mile, I knew that I’d be facing a couple mostly uphill miles in the direct sunlight. So, I altered my intervals and found a nice pace. Even though it was a slower pace than I would have liked, I was happy to be making it through all of my intervals! That got be back in good spirits. I knew the 6th mile would be mostly downhill. So, the plan was to go back to my 1 minute run/1 minute walk intervals in that mile and the one after it. After all, I knew the 6th mile would end around the start of my usual 3 mile loop. Well, by the time I got to the end of 6 miles, I realized that I would be almost completely in sun until the end of the 7th mile and possibly for the rest of my planned route. The sun was wearing on me at that point and I decided to call it a day after 6.2 miles. Initially, I did think of running again later in the evening to finish all 9 miles. However, the chores of the day took too long for that to happen.

I ended the week feeling pretty tired. If I were to grade the week, I would give it a solid “B” because I missed one workout and I didn’t finish all the miles I had planned on Saturday. Otherwise, I’m happy to have finished 4 workouts in one week again. This week felt like a base building kind of week. For my upcoming week, I’ll have the challenge of repeating this with a bible study on Thursday night thrown into the mix. I’m hoping to build on the success of this past week.