The shortest best worst week.

I always take the week after a big race off completely from running.

I don't do my shorter speedwork-type runs during the week. I sleep in to the BIG WHOOPIE late hour of 7:30am on Saturday. I drink on Friday night without worrying about how I'll feel in the morning's early hours.

And I feel zero guilt.

I bask in the glory (and waning soreness) of having finished a big race and think nothing at all about having bacon with all three meals.

It is, in a word, the Best.

That was last week.

Unfortunately, last week was also my first week back at work after my sabbatical, so that made it the Worst week, in a way. Not that I hate my job at all, but it's just that I loved my sabbatical weeks so much that, by comparison, it was totally the red-headed stepchild week and I wanted to slap it or make it stand in the corner the whole time.

Also, because it was my Post-Race Break Week, it was also very short.

Especially when I got up on Saturday to go out for my first long-ish run since Seattle, after sleeping in a little longer than normal for a training day, and found myself trudging through a short-ish six mile trot under actual sunshine.

Ew.

See, usually, for training purposes, I get up early-ish on Saturday morning, so that I can get my miles in under cover of darkness or at least clouds. And by 8am, the clouds were disintegrating faster than I could make it around my tried and true six mile loop and, obviously, any shade of darkness had vanished into full blown Day.

And the whole time I was out there, semi-baking beneath the rapidly revealing sun ball, I kept thinking that my break week had seemed awfully short and how come the weeks never seem that short when I'm at the end of my training and staring down a 12 mile run.

But I think we know the reason to that, so I won't bore you with any more of my brain's idle minutia on that topic.

On another running related topic, however, I signed up to run San Jose in October.

Because I guess I can't go back to Life Without Running any day soon because I've changed my lifestyle (read: eating lifestyle) to accommodate Life With Running and that means I eat just whatever I want, really, and imagine that my 20+ miles a week will handle it.

Without that 20+ miles a week? Well, my bikini and I would have a falling out. Specifically my ass cheeks would be falling out. And other parts that become excessively jiggly without the requisite running of miles would follow suit.

And I think you know that if I don't have an event out there, just looming in the distance with PR implications and the potential for public self-shaming, I'm probably not going to do these long runs that get me to my 20+ miles/week and that is when things start falling out of bikinis.

I'll need all my parts IN my bikini soon, so no flaming out now. Must get back to it.

So, I did my six on Saturday and then a few miles of speedwork this morning with the dog, which wasn't so much speedwork as it was trying to run while simultaneously trying not to catch the whiff of the poo bag I got the pleasure of carrying throughout mile 3, and after another day of speedwork this week, I'll go out this Saturday and run seven. Likely at an earlier hour so that my precious dewy flesh doesn't scorch under the sun ball and so that the sidewalks and bike lanes will be devoid of double strollers and zombies carrying trays of Starbucks.

What's in that coffee, people, that you must cart it around in bulk?

Anyway.

I'll be back on the Supah Technical Training Schedule so that, come September, I'll do some 11 and 12 mile runs so that potentially maybe if I'm lucky I can go for a PR in San Jose come October.

Which will now be a little bit harder since I came to find out that my time in Seattle was actually a blistering 2:23:57, rather than the initially reported 2:24:00.

For the record, when I registered just now, I put my predicted finish as 2:20:00, which might be a bit of pipe dream, although not as much as my Super Secret Predicted Wish Finish time of 2:TEENS:.

If you feel like crossing your fingers for me from now until October, I'd be ever so grateful.