Procrastination and Irony All in One Morning

You know you're not in the mood to go to the gym when the following activities are not only more appealing, you actually do them (while of course, dressed in full gym regalia and running shoes. Because you're going. Really, you are.):

- Cleaning the litter boxes
- Hand washing bras
- Scrubbing last night's roast pan
- Returning movies to the video store
- Returning what was obviously a sales call dressed up as a pretend potential client call from a commercial realtor

I was contemplating painting the basement when I accepted I was being ridiculous, set aside my fatigue and general crabbiness and went. It was pretty busy and the good treadmills were taken, but thankfully the one I got has an interval program so today's workout could proceed as planned.
I have a terrible habit of falling into a rut of the same workouts, and I've been consciously trying to mix it up a bit because it's obviously what works for all y'all experienced athletes. Hence today's speed intervals.

Long story short - it SUCKED. Not the running part - that was fine. My calves froze up on me pretty bad, hurt quite a bit, made me stop quite frequently to stretch out the pain - that's what sucked. (Hot wasabi balls, in case you're curious as to what, exactly, it was sucking.) My best workouts always start with 10-15 minutes of easy walking and then some good stretching before I can even think about running. I blew that off today because the interval program allowed for 5 minutes of slow walking warm-up... clearly I won't make that mistake again. (OK, yeah, I know - I'll TOTALLY make it again. But not for a while.)

One nice surprise - the interval program on this machine very different from my favorite treadmill (which is 2 min run/2 min walk ad infinitum) and I really liked it. This was sets of 1 min intervals of run hard/walk fast for 5 min mixed in with longer 5 min sets of moderate jogging (total 45 minutes). Because of the stiff calves I had to push the fast walk way down to an easy walk, but I (easily!) pushed the run intervals to an 11:30 pace (fastest yet), with the very last one at an 11:10 pace just to see how it felt (surprisingly comfortable, but 40 min into a 45 min workout I couldn't keep it up more than a minute).

Oh yeah, wait. I had a point but I lost it. Stu! It was about Simply Stu. I'm out of GYGOs so have been going back to catch up on the early episodes of Simply Stu. And as irony would have it, he was doing a speed interval workout and talking about how you really need to feel good - to really feel your best - when you're heading out to do a speed interval workout.

I decided to relish the irony and consider it a lesson learned. But it's good to know what kind of workouts to avoid on the days when I feel so pissy and tired that scrubbing baked-on grease is more appealing than fresh air and exercise.