Warrior Girl Dashing….T-19 and counting

Is it just me or does this tree look pregnant?

This tree reminds me to have fun when I’m training. Play! Laugh! Stop and admire the pregnant trees! It isn’t always fun. Correction: every bit of it is fun until the running makes me feel nauseous. I don’t understand this phenomenon. I can bike, ski or skate for miles, do dozens of push-ups, sit-ups, squat jumps, burpies, chin-ups… you name it. Nothing makes me feel nauseated like running distance. Sprints? No problem. Dozens of sprints? Hey, bring it on. But run at a slower pace for a kilometer or more? Forget it. I get nauseated.  This has always been the case, since I was in grade school, and learned quickly enough to beg off. Uh, I have a hernia. Can’t do it. Ironically, I gave it another go in high school, running cross-country, for as long as I could stand it, and then went back for more in university, briefly, and then did a few triathlons in my twenties.  Always with these breaks between, but always coming back. Have you ever heard Einstein`s definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  I thought this tendency to nausea would change. It never did.  That is why I quit running for good, finally, when I was about 30. I have often blamed it on my errant knees but that wasn’t really it.  Nah, the main reason is that running just makes me want to toss my cookies, and what fun is that? So, since all this Warrior Girl Dashing is about having fun (and not stupidly injuring myself by entering a race I haven’t trained for), I have given myself permission to stop running and walk when I feel queasy. You’d think that would be an easy thing. It is not. It is almost impossible to stop when you have trained yourself over years to move through the discomfort (notwithstanding that you know full well that you may feel sick for the rest of the day if you do… well, that’s my bizarre experience anyway).  I don’t know what it is that makes me keep going. Pride? Stupidity? Stubbornness?  A lack of levity perhaps? And so the pregnant tree will serve as a reminder: Lighten up for pete’s sakes. Walk. Pick a flower. Who cares? The idea is to have fun on July 9. To climb over cars and haystacks. To crawl through mud. To sprint up that ski hill, and then walk if I want to. Lyric of the Day: Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala”, On the Floor, Jennifer Lopez and Pit Bull Today’s Training:

  • 3 1-mile laps on my bike
  • 800 m run
  • W circuits 1:
    • Monkey bar climb x 2
    • dash through the pine forest
    • Monkey bar climb x 2
    • Crawl under the trampoline
  • 400 m walk + 400 m run
  • W circuit 2:
    • 5 sets of 10 lunges going uphill (this is my version of Hell’s Hill, until I screw up the nerve to ask the neighbours if I can run up their grassy hill)
    • Monkey bar climb x 2
  • 200 m run + 200 m walk + 400 m run
  • At this point I realized I’d forgotten the tire section of my first warrior loop, dang.
  • 5 laps of the tires = that is 140 tires tip-toed through