Time Off

I'm finally doing it...I'm taking four hours off tomorrow morning.  This week I began to notice that I was becoming very gloomy, depressed and felt burnt out.  The last time I had a quasi-day off was in mid-late April when I was up in Taji doing equipment inventories.  The last day I was up there all of the inventories were complete and so it was almost like a day off before we had to fly back to Falcon.  Both yesterday and today I noticed that even though I've been getting plenty of sleep my body felt the same as it does after I've been awake for 36 hours.  This afternoon I decided to finally make the decision to take some time off, and while I was walking back to my room tonight I realized just how much I do need to take a break.  I was walking down a road that has 20ft tall concrete barriers running parrallel to it and at one point, though I'm not sure how I managed to do it, but I ran into the barriers and fell down.  Thankfully it was dark out and I don't think anybody saw me fall, but if anyone did see me I'm sure they spent the rest of the night laughing at the LT who ran into a barrier and fell down because she was walking next to it. I had a good laugh at myself after I picked myself off the ground.   

5 Miles :)

Today I ran 5 miles faster than I ever have before: 40:12.  I cheated a bit because it was on a treadmill and the incline was at 0%.  The first 5 min were at a 9:14 pace at 0.5% incline.  Then I went up to 8min/mile pace at 0.5% incline for another mile or so  before going down to 0% incline and going up to a 7:54 min/mile pace, and then increased the pace for last 0.5 mile up to 7:30 min/mile pace and then up a bit more for the last quarter mile.  I left the gym quite happy :)

Work...Sleep...Run

I suppose it's been a while since I have written anything, though Heidi is still winning the lack-of-new-post contest.  Not a whole lot is new here, save for that I have a new job since the last time I posted on here.  Work keeps me rather busy and most of my time is spent dealing with detainees, though not in person.  I try and shoot for about a 13.5 hour work day (not including PT), I'm very happy if it is only a 12.5 hour work-day, but don't sweat it if it is 14-15 hours. The only downside of the longer work days is that I have less motivation to get up at 6am the next morning to go for a run. Soon I'll have to start running even earlier since it's starting to get hot by 6am now.  Before, it didn't really start to heat up outside until 7am. 

 

I've found that if I don't run in the morning I have no energy that day.  Even with that knowledge it is still very hard for me to pull myself out of bed a lot of mornings.  The past month I've averaged 17 miles a week, though my goal is to average at least 20 miles.  Some mornings, in order to motivate myself to get up, I make a deal with myself that if I get up and run early I can go back to bed after my shower until 8am.  The plan sometimes backfires on me though, like this morning.  I planned to run 5 miles, but had a really hard time getting up and so I made the deal again.  The problem was that I got up later than usual and I knew that I wouldn't have much time to sleep, so I ended up only running two miles on the treadmill so that I would at least run 17 this week...and then went back to bed. 

 

There are also many days that I think about how eventually I'm going to be able to take leave, and that going to bed and sleeping for an incredibly long time sounds wonderful.  I'm not sure why I'm so tired because I do get plenty of sleep, and if I don't get enough sleep it's my own doing...such as right now. 

 

We're supposedly allowed to take 4 hours off a week (come in late or leave early), but I have yet to see anyone do that.  Some days I may take a bit of a longer lunch, or like today, go visit a friend for two hours because I needed to talk to someone and get my mind off of things, but even then I feel like I'm slacking because I'm gone for so long.  There are occasional days that I'll come in late or other people will come in late, but it's always because we had to stay really late or were called back in to work the night before.  On the upside, right now the weeks are moving very fast.  I can't believe it's already Sunday again. 

 

Time to get some sleep.  Good night.