the trick is to keep breathing

I've been doing moderately better at getting my workouts in. I say 'moderately' because I've been hampered by my neck -- I've had the stabbing can't-turn-my-head type of pain on and off but more or less consistently for the last 6 weeks. Some days my neck will move and it's just pain, maybe a 4 on the pain scale; other days it locks up and I can't look over my shoulder or touch my ear to my shoulder, and that's somewhere like an 8 or 9. It's easy for me to ignore lower levels of pain - I haven't had a pain-free day in at least seven years - but this is severe and hampering enough that I'm finally taking steps to get it looked at. My chiropractor says it's a pinched nerve. My doctor gets to weigh in this afternoon. More on that later; the point is, I've been fighting whatever this injury/malady is, and many days, I don't feel right doing any kind of full workout when I'm in that much pain.

The real point of this post is that I'm thinking of switching gyms.

Right now I'm a member of RPFitness and I don't really have any problems with it. It's a very nice gym. The equipment is well-kept, it's rarely too crowded to do what you want to do, and it's about $38/month. They offer some classes for free (yoga, some body pump type classes, spinning), and some you have to pay for (the "FIT" classes, which are kind of like 30 minutes of BodyRock with a trainer), but with my schedule my ability to attend classes is limited. Right now I only visit once, maybe twice a week, to use their weight machines, freeweights, and other equipment, because I'm running outside so much. I've already been considering alternatives, because $38/month is only a dollar a day from one point of view, but if I only go 4-8 times a month, isn't there some other way I can do those exercises and not pay for it? You know?

The new gym that I'm looking at is $53/month, but it has a pool. Recently, for whatever reason, I've really been missing swimming. I was a state-level varsity swimmer for all four years in high school, and I taught swim lessons during the summers I was a lifeguard to help put myself through school. I love swimming, I always have, and as I get older and these fucking injuries get worse and worse, I've started thinking about it more and more. I may have come to terms with what running does for my body but that doesn't mean I like it. At all. And I won't know until I try, but since swimming is a known quantity, a known positive, I feel like I'd be more likely to stick with a workout routine that incorporated swimming than I have been with running - I can train for races, but I've proven that left to my own devices I rarely run (until I start feeling gross). Consistency has always been my problem and it's stupid to assume that will just go away with a simple switch, but at the same time, if it's something I enjoy more, I should be less likely to skip it.

So for $15/month more I would have everything I have now, plus access to a track, plus access to a pool. And a hot tub and sauna.

In September I'll be done with my race commitments, and I have really been thinking about putting running on the back burner and trying three months of using swimming as my cardio. I called RPFitness, and I can actually "suspend" my account for up to three months - I won't use their gym and won't pay for a three-month period, but if I decide to go back, I can do so without having to pay their initiation/enrollment fee again since my account was suspended rather than cancelled.

Of course, to join the other gym I will have to pay an enrollment fee, which is... usually it's something like $275 which is ha ha ha no, but right now they're running a deal until the end of August, and the fee is very highly discounted. So on one hand right now seems like a great time to try it out - I can suspend my RPF membership, pay a lower fee, try the other gym out for 3 months, and make a decision in November.

On the other hand: I have to do it before the end of August, and the Akron Marathon Relay we always run is at the end of September, so in September I'll still be heavily running because I'll be training for the race. Also, even the discounted enrollment fee is still a lot of money and I won't get that back, whether I stick with the new gym or return to the old: it's lost on the chance that I'll like this gym better. Even though I have a good job and solid savings, poor!Sev still lives in my backbrain, and I don't like just throwing money around simply because I have it available.

( Pros and Cons because I love lists )


So that's what I'm musing on today.

I've struggled a lot with working out / staying fit / being healthy in 2012. My biggest problem has been consistency.

On the short term, my mindset looks like this:

• [Sunday] I'm going to be so healthy this week and work out all the time! I go to the gym. I go to the grocery store and buy awesome high-protein breakfast and lunch ingredients, and awesome fresh simple high-protein dinners, and do a lot of cooking.
• [Monday, Tuesday] Still kind of motivated! Hit the gym! cook more.
• [Wednesday, Thursday] I'm getting burnt out and exhausted from my stupid exhausting job!! I don't have the energy to go to the gym today. I'll eat these leftovers. Maybe have some wine. Sit on my ass. Today sucked though.
• [Friday, Saturday] I'm still exhausted! And I deserve a weekend break from life! I'm not going to the freaking gym, these are my days off!
• [Sunday] I'M STILL A CHUBSTER? HOW DO DIET. WHAT ARE RUNNING. Okay. Fine. I'm going to be so healthy this week...

*REPEAT FOR MONTHS*

On the long term, I've been set back by arthritic busted toes, my trusty neck/shoulder knot, a lingering bad ankle, a travel schedule that just won't quit, and the overall underlying sense of exhaustion, fatigue, and hopelessness that you find at the bottom of the barrel of fucks.

Neither of these situations are good for consistency. If I can't get momentum up over a week, I'll never keep it going long-term; if I can't stay healthy and motivated, what's the point of even doing a week.

I can't build up a decent running base because of this -- every time I get up to even 8, 10 miles a week, something happens - either exhaustion, injury, business, or busy-ness - and I'll go a week without running at all. And you can't do any kind of weight training program without a consistent schedule and a consistent base. I'll up my squat load 10lb, but then I won't make it back to the gym for 8 days to do more squats, so I'll stall and gain nothing except pain and more exhaustion.

( Workout weekends )

Not that anyone but me cares about this lololol. But hey. If I spent as much time actually working out as I did reading about fitness and training plans, I'd be an award-winning marathon runner and a certified yoga instructor whooooooooooooooooooooops

The Akron Marathon (Relay) is only 2 days away! I am starting to get excited/nervous about it -- last week I was ready to just have it over and done with, but now, I'm preoccupied with how I am going to do and whether the 200 miles of training I've put in are going to show up or not.

Jeff and I both got free shirts from Bridgestone, though - Bridgestone's a sponsor of this race, and because we're employees, we get Bridgestone running shirts. I will, of course, be running in my J-Squad shirt, but I will never say no to a free tech shirt. They're really nice. (That means that for this one race, I'll have gotten 3 shirts: the official Akron one, the Bridgestone one, and our Team J-Squad one. Sweet!)

I can't decide how confident I am about the race. I did my half marathon (13.1 miles) at a 10:00/mile, so I should be faster than that for a leg that's only 7.9 miles, plus I have trained a lot since then. However, the training has been a lot of long slow miles, and when I do faster tempo runs, I feel like I'm going to die - and they're only 4 miles long. So I have absolutely no idea how to predict my performance. My 'goals' are, in order:

• Beat last year's time of 81 minutes
• 75 minutes (~9:30/mile)
• 73 minutes (minus one minute per mile from last year)
• 71 minutes (~9:00/mile)

It may sound dumb to have this many goals, but I am pretty sensitive to "how I am doing" when I'm running. If I feel like I'm doing well, I get motivated to go harder. If I feel like I'm going poorly, I get upset, and that interferes with my breathing and makes me run worse. So, I try to have levels of goals that include things I am pretty sure I can do, so that I don't get too upset. Running is just as much about the mental as it is about the physical, you know.

I've been trying to go to bed early-ish this week, and tonight and tomorrow I'll be in bed very early. #loser Then again, I have to be up at balls-o-clock on Saturday. #yuck

Anyway, wish me luck! Soon you'll all be free from my talk about training, ha ha ha.

In absolutely no order at all:

• Had a pretty good weekend full of friends, fireworks, and drunkenness. Got chased by the cops (yes, we are all 30 years old), did some amazing karaoke with safety_caesars as Edgar and Locke, watched Lithium play an awesome show, and sewed. A lot.


• Finished my Azula costume for our Avatar group at Otakon 2011. The costume's functionally finished - I need to give it a good smoothing over (tightening hems, adding fancier trim, some flashy buttons for fun, etc) but at the moment I could wear it and be okay with it. A good afternoon's attention to the details will make it very awesome. Still to do:
  
  • Wig
  • Bitty Collar (the piece right around her neck; I've done the two more floppy collars already)
  • Ribbon / trim for the boots (I have boots)
  • Fancier gold trim or buttons for the bigger collars; gold trim or fabric paint for the symbols on her ~loincloth~
  • General Smoothing and Touch-Ups


• Made decent headway on my Porom costume (again for Otakon 2011). I have most of the materials in hand; it's mostly just a matter of construction, as it's one of those great costumes which a) defies real-world physics and b) isn't even canonically consistent if you compare the art to the FMV to the sprite. Go Squeenix. You jerks. This costume is going to be really, really hard to pee in.


• Started Dragon Age as a distraction. It is a successful one.


• Realized there are only 12 weeks until the Akron Marathon Relay! At which I would like to be A LOT FASTER >.> So, I have constructed a training plan with the help of SmartCoach on RunnersWorld.com. The plan is pretty interesting!~ It looks very in-depth, telling me pacings for my intervals and tempos and stuff like that, and even though I still hate running I'm kind of excited to try it and see if it works. For $15 I can get a month of access to the "Master Training Plan" on their website, and I am thinking about doing that too, because $15 isn't that much for a month and I could just print it all out at the end of the month. I have really been lazy about running recently, although part of it has been letting this awful tendonitis thing heal itself, so I can't take all of the blame entirely.


• Mostly: yup awesome

How was everyone else's weekend?

So I ran the Pittsburgh Half Marathon on Sunday!

Before I went into the race, I had decided that my goal times were 2:20 (low end) and 2:10 (high end) - I would have been perfectly happy with the low-end time, about a 10:40 mile, and the high-end goal (a 10:00 mile) was for if I felt really good going into the race.

Well, I'm not really sure I felt all that good, but I pushed really, really hard, and I pretty much made my high-end goal time for myself. 13.1 miles in 2:10:56 was my official finishing time.

yes, I am still a little weird sharing my real name online (even though like 75% of you probably know it anyway)


[HM] Pittsburgh Half Marathon by seventhe on Garmin Connect

( All the nerdy facts, stories, reports, and graphs! )
I haven't taken a week off of running since January 1st.

I am really proud of jennyclarinet and I -- we talked about doing this while dressed in togas and drinking Four Loko!, and look what it turned into. Without Jenny I probably wouldn't have been able to stick with this, but knowing that Jenny was training hard and that we were going to do this together (even though we didn't run together) made me stick to my training plan during the hardest semester I've ever had, when it would have been really easy to quit. I had Denis training too, and I knew Jim would be playing, so there was a lot motivating me to keep up the work. It certainly wasn't easy, but hey, if I can work a full-time job that makes me endure 11-hour days and hold a full-time graduate semester workload and train for a half marathon...

And that's the story of how I ran 13.1 miles. My legs hate me now. The end!

Yes, I realize it was probably kind of silly to run a 5K the week before I run a half marathon. But it was a fun little charity event, some people from work were doing it, and I had a chance to run with Jeff and katmillia, which I was really looking forward to. Plus, $20 reg including a tech shirt? I'm down with that.

My goals for the race were pretty simple:
1. Don't injure self (half marathon is next week, dummy!)
2. Have fun!
3. Without injuring, time of 29:00 or below (~9:21 pace)

and in that order. I really was trying to not put an ideal time on it -- I've been training specifically for 5 months now, and I know what I *can* and *can't* run, so I knew what to expect, but I didn't want to push too hard in a silly little race and hurt myself for next week.

[5K] Just a Run in the Park by seventhe at Garmin Connect - Details

Final time:
    28:10 for 3.17 (watch)
    28:20 for 3.1 (chip)

Discrepancy explained: The chip started when the gun went off, but the actual start line for the 5K was a little ways away from where we lined up. I started my watch about 10 seconds after the gun, and only a bit before the start line. The difference in the two puts me between 8:53/mile and 9:08/mile. Based on my memories of the layout I think the most accurate measurement is 3.1 miles in 28:10, which is about a 9:05/mile pace.

The Just a Run in the Park 5K was very small and I kind of liked it that way. I heard only ~250 people were signed up, and I would honestly estimate that not all of them ran the 5K either (there was a 1mile run before the 5K). It was a little charity run for the local YMCA, and it was really cool: the start was laidback; we didn't have to get there too early or anything. We had time to walk our bags back to the car, and before the race started we all just hung our sweatshirts on a fence and trusted that they would be there when we got back (they were) (to be super safe, I did stick my car key in my sports bra, so if my nasty jacket did get stolen I was only out my inhaler, not my car). It was a very up-and-back-type course, lots of looping around things, with a bit of an incline in the middle and a pretty nice downhill at the end.

I had intended to start out at a 9:30 pace and then push at the end if I could, but the "pack" took off fairly fast and I really just kept up with it until I realized it felt ok. I'm pretty happy with my time; no, I'm not great, but it's pretty much in line with my training runs, and it's faster than I had in my head. I wasn't expecting to ~magically~ drop 3 minutes off of the times I saw in training or anything, so I feel pretty good about it. I was expecting to be slower mostly because I haven't been able to run very much in the last ~2 weeks due to these weird calf injuries -- I'm surprised (pleasantly) that I am this fast because I had expected to lose some fitness. But I guess that's what over 200 miles of training in 5 months does for my running ability! My speed has mostly stayed intact, I guess; let's hope my endurance has, too...

My legs were still sore going into the race, and I could feel all the places in my shins and calves (and left hamstring!) where the bad/injured spots are. But it was ok to run through, and hopefully tomorrow I won't be in too much pain. It does seem to be getting better with ice and rest, so I think I'll be okay for next week if not great.

I plugged my 5K time into some of the online "pace predicting" calculators, and they all seem to think I can do a half marathon in 2:10 -- that's just under a 10:00/mile for the whole half. That seems really optimistic to me; in my head I was hoping for about a 10:30/mile finish, which I think is around 2:20, and planning to be slower than that with water breaks etc. I will probably start out pacing myself for the latter, slower time, so that I don't kill myself early and have massive problems -- but it's interesting that all the predictors say I will be faster, and I am now kind of curious to see what kind of time I turn in. Of course the predictor calculators all point out that you need to be "appropriately trained" - obviously you can't just jump from a 5K to a halfmary without serious weekly mileage! - and I've had two weeks on my ass, so. Challenge noted, pace predictors, but not entirely accepted.

Another thing to note about this run, which is worth noting for next week: my asthma didn't show up. I was certainly breathing hard, but it's the hard breathing I associate with you just ran three miles you fucker, not the impossible shallow breathing that is my asthma. And I think this is because I took three pre-emptive doses of my inhaler: one at 6:30 with breakfast, one at 7:30, and one at about 8:10 right before we lined up for the race. I guess I don't really know if it was a mental thing or if it was effective dosing-of-self, but I'll definitely be doing the same thing for the half next week.

So yup, there it is. I'm glad I did it, and I'm really happy katmillia and I got to run a race together before she leaves for pretty much all summer XD. This mostly marks the end of my half marathon training plans... the only thing I would run this week, if my legs feel OK, would be a calibration run somewhere to just perfect my Garmin FR60 footpod before the half... We'll see!

Week #11 was a serious workhorse week. It showed in my times and my heart rate - I worked a little too hard, and my pace was slow because of it. But I think it was a good thing overall; 3 weeks left of training should be enough to recover and hopefully I gained a lot from kicking my own ass.

	Tempo Run / Intervals	Long Run	Easy Recovery Run	total	target
Week #1	3.07 mi	5.4 mi	3.2 mi	11.67 mi	11 mi
Week #2	3.5 mi	4.85 mi	3.64 mi	12 mi	12 mi
Week #3	4 mi	6.6 mi	3.3 mi	13.9 mi	13.3 mi
Week #4	3.87 mi	7.5 mi	3.3 mi	14.67 mi	14.6 mi
Week #5	4.2 mi	8.9 mi	3.4 mi	16.5 mi	16 mi
Week #6	4.5 mi				REST
Week #7	5.5 mi	6 mi	4.8 mi	16.3 mi	16 mi
Week #8	4.1 mi	9.3 mi	4.5 mi	17.9 mi	18 mi
Week #9	3.1 mi	8.8 mi	3.4 mi	15.3 mi	15 mi
Week #10	6.5 mi	11 mi	4 mi	21.5 mi	20 mi
Week #11	4.3 mi	10.3 mi	5.7 mi	20.3 mi	22 mi

On Week #11:

• The 4.3 mile run was a hill run. It was a very rainy day and I had to run on the treadmill, so I did increasing hills over each mile, all the way up to 6%. 6% incline on a treadmill while running a 10:00-10:30 mile is pretty freaking hard. I was really sweaty and tired when this was over. I hated it, but I feel good about having done it because it was so hard.


• The 5.7 mi run was a 'negative split' run, where each mile is done faster than the last. I started off really pretty slow - still tired from the hills, and also this was an outdoor run on a course that has a lot of natural hills too - but each mile was about 15 seconds faster than the last one. The last 0.5 miles of this run was done super fast (for me!), up to an 8:00/mile pace. Exhausting.


• The 10 mile run sucked. I just worked too hard on other stuff this week, and also I had to bump it up a day because of Easter. It was terrible, I was slow, and it was really painful. The end.

Overall, I'm glad I did this week because I'm sure all of the gross work will make me a little bit better at some point. But it was probably a little bit too much to put into a single week - hills, more hills, negative splits on hills, and a long run. It shows in my times/pace too, which was pretty slow, and I think it's just because I overworked this week even though the mileage didn't climb as I had intended.

I'm in a lot of pain this week, too - my legs are hurting, sharp stabbing pains in a variety of really fun places, and I honestly think it's just me starting to find my body's natural limits. Again: usually in the past when I run it's my lungs that die first, so my legs are really unused to being pushed to their limits (because I can't get to their limits when I'm on the ground from an asthma attack). I've got pain in my quads and my calves and I'm stiff and groaning like I am very very old, and I'm icing and stretching everything like a good girl but I really think this is a week for recovery. Lots of miles, but nice easy ones.

This week:

• Recover from last week's grossness


• Easy, medium pace (~10:00 mile) 4-6 mile runs, x2


• Easy, slow pace 12 mile run


• Total mileage goal: 22-24 miles

	Tempo Run / Intervals	Long Run	Easy Recovery Run	total	target
Week #1	3.07 mi	5.4 mi	3.2 mi	11.67 mi	11 mi
Week #2	3.5 mi	4.85 mi	3.64 mi	12 mi	12 mi
Week #3	4 mi	6.6 mi	3.3 mi	13.9 mi	13.3 mi
Week #4	3.87 mi	7.5 mi	3.3 mi	14.67 mi	14.6 mi
Week #5	4.2 mi	8.9 mi	3.4 mi	16.5 mi	16 mi
Week #6	4.5 mi				REST
Week #7	5.5 mi	6 mi	4.8 mi	16.3 mi	16 mi
Week #8	4.1 mi	9.3 mi	4.5 mi	17.9 mi	18 mi
Week #9	3.1 mi	8.8 mi	3.4 mi	15.3 mi	15 mi

Week #9 was an impromptu rest week to recover from some general pain and minor leg injuries.

• 3.1 miles - a tempo run, 0.5mi 'on' and 0.5mi 'off', where even the 'off' stretches were fast for me. I did the 5K in 28:40, which for my asthmatic butt AND on an injury is pretty good.


• The 3.5 miler was supposed to be 5-6 miles, but I had an asthma attack. I blame allergies. Stupid tree sex.


• So, my 8.8 miler. I wanted to get in a long slow run, but I also really wanted this to be a REST week because if I don't HEAL I'm not going to be able to run this race. So I set the interval timer on my wristwatch, and did 5 minutes of jogging / 1 minute walking, for 90 minutes. It was enough of a workout that I still feel relatively accomplished this week, but hopefully it wasn't so harsh of a strain on my calves that I got into more trouble.

Although that marks the end of Resting. The race is officially 5 weeks of training away!

This week's goals:

• 10.5 miles, outside


• 20 miles total

Yup: I hurt myself running.

Side note #1: I don't often have to think about or deal with injuries. This isn't because I am some boss physical specimen - I am the opposite, really; it's more because my lungs usually stress out and die long before my body> does. And not that I like having asthma attacks - spoiler: THEY AREN'T MUCH FUN - but again, they trigger far before my legs tire out or my feet start hurting.

Side note #2: I have one and a half bad ankles. When I was a senior in high school* - over a decade ago** - I tore a large ligament in my right ankle. Ligaments don't heal themselves. Shortly after, as my poor ankle was unused to operating weak, I tore a couple smaller ones. In the year or so after, still getting used to my wonky ankle, I tore some of the small ones in my left ankle. They're better, and I haven't badly hurt myself since the time in college I tripped while walking to class and passed out from the pain (no, really, I woke up in my bed in my dorm room and couldn't move for 4 hours because it hurt so badly I was puking everywhere). But I still lack a lot of proper ligaments, and so whenever I step/trip funny enough, it tugs on one of the few remaining ones and, you know, hurts pretty badly, because they're all overworked and pretty angry at me for what I've put them through. (It's cool. My body and I fight like this a lot.)

If you read the last running entry, you'll notice that I jacked my ankle - the half-bad one, not the real-bad one - during Sunday's run. Well, apparently when I did so I adjusted my stride -- not a bad idea; running through the sharp pain will help stretch the ligament out, if I can do it. But apparently whatever I did has come back to bite me in the ass.

During yesterday's run I noticed that my calves were really tight. Okay, I said; instead of doing the fast miles I was planning on, I'll just do some slow miles and run it out, stretch it out at a slower pace, right? Wrong. By the time I was on mile 3 I was limping. My left lower calf muscle/back ankle was(/is) so tight I couldn't even really walk on it. I got off the treadmill and finished the last bit on the (world's smallest) track the gym has on the upper level, thinking maybe something about my stride on the treadmill was being a jerk. Fast, slow, didn't matter: running wasn't helping, and stretching wasn't helping either.

By the time I got home I was so gimpy I kind of threw myself towards the fridge, obtained a bag of ice, and tossed my body onto the couch for a bit of icing it. With some icing, a warm shower, more stretching, and a lot of rest, I got it to the point where it just 'hurts' today rather than 'feels stabbed with knives'.

But it does mean I'm probably skipping yoga today and dropping both the mileage and the speed on this week's target workout. I can't afford to take a week off but I really can't afford to get hurt this close to the half marathon. Hopefully it's just something tight that I can eventually work out, because I really wanted to do 10 miles this Sunday.

Any runners have experience with stuff like this?

*I spent most of my senior year of high school in a wheelchair or on crutches, between this injury and the massive set of foot surgeries I had to have due to my broken and nonexistent immune system.
**My sweet heaven, I am old.

Week #5 of Sev's Half-Marathon Training Plan:

	Tempo Run / Intervals	Long Run	Easy Recovery Run	total	target
Week #1	3.07 mi	5.4 mi	3.2 mi	11.67 mi	11 mi
Week #2	3.5 mi	4.85 mi	3.64 mi	12 mi	12 mi
Week #3	4 mi	6.6 mi	3.3 mi	13.9 mi	13.3 mi
Week #4	3.87 mi	7.5 mi	3.3 mi	14.67 mi	14.6 mi
Week #5	4.2 mi	8.9 mi	3.4 mi	16.5 mi	16 mi

• For Week #5, I started adding interval training, to replace a tempo run. Interval training is alternating a very high intensity near-sprint with a low-intensity jog or even walk, on a much shorter time scale, like 100m fast / 200m slow, or 1min fast / 2min slow, or 1:1, or 2:3, depending on what your body can handle. The point is to get up to a near sprint on the fast parts but then let your heart rate recover on the slow parts. Tempo running involves holding a medium-high-intensity pace for longer periods, like 1-3 miles at a time, with jogging rests between only if necessary. So this run was an interval run.


• The 8.9-mile long run I ended up doing at a 10:00 mile pace. To keep things interesting (and because I was curious!) I did 1 mile on 7 different treadmills, 2mi on the last one - so I got a short break between miles as I moved treadmills. In each case, 1 mile on the treadmill was 1.03-1.1 miles on my Garmin. That is really only 10% error which doesn't seem unreasonable for a public gym treadmill used by all different kinds of bodies which can't be calibrated every day. It's just that the 10% adds up over, say, 8 miles! My 8 miles became 8.9 miles! It's treadmill magic! *BARFS*


• I did my easy recovery run outside. It was pretty nice, even though it was cooolllllllld. If you look at the run, the long break in the middle of it was me walking around the high school track, trying to find a place I could hope the fence and run a mile. The presence of police in the area convinced me to not break into a high school track, and I ran home instead.
  And this run also confirms that my Garmin really is calibrated. I ran a stretch of road that I can track on GMaps Pedometer online, and that I've driven in my car, so I know the distance. GMaps-Pedometer says the stretch of road is 1.285 miles. My Garmin recorded 1.3 miles on the way down and 1.26 on the way back. That's only 3% error in the Garmin and I can probably attribute that to me not necessarily being able to hit the lap button at THE EXACT SAME PLACE while crossing traffic. Also the average of the two numbers is pretty much exactly what GMaps tells me.
  So I believe the Garmin a lot more now. Still not sure what's up with the treadmills - I keep meaning to ask the owner if they've been calibrated, but I can't ever seem to find him on days I'm there. NEVER GIVE A NERD A WAY TO COLLECT DATA ON REPETITIVE ACTIONS, it doesn't end well for anyone except the nerd.
  

Week #6 is finally a rest week, oh my god thank fuckness. My only goal for Week 6 is 3 x 4mi runs. That's it. Giving my poor legs (and lungs!) a much-needed break.