Mental insanity!

1. Suffering very acutely from mental insanity today. Cannot say if it is the cause or the effect of last night's sleeplessness, but it is ridiculous, I am completely frenetic, I am strongly hoping it will go away again soon!

2. If I were a Puppy, the Person I lived with would be firmly putting me in my Crate and saying, when I whined and started bouncing off the walls of the Crate, "Sometimes it is necessary to be cruel to be kind..." But People do not have Crates to help them calm down! I need a device like one of these...

3. An honest person turned in my watch to the Lost and Found!

4. In a way, one is more likely to get back a watch than a bathing suit/cap/goggles unit. The latter, although the replacement value is fairly similar, sort of has the aura of trash--I am not so sure someone would bring it upstairs to the front desk, and then sooner or later it will get stolen or thrown away...

5. Because it is a university gym, there is some sense of community that makes it more likely someone will turn in a watch--the one I left on the treadmill last year was at the local hole-in-the-wall gym, which is very pleasant in its mildly sordid way but where I am not perhaps so confident a sense of community would incline most members to have a helpful and communitarian attitude towards found possessions...

6. However on the wrist-mounted device complementarity front, my Polar monitor is gradually losing one function after another. It has always been irksome transferring data to the computer, but now the SonicLink function seems to be working only very erratically. And the HR readings are quite erratic also, it has been jumping around and giving me some singularly farfetched numbers that I can tell have nothing to do with my actual exercise. I think I must get a new one, worth trying something different to see if it will be better?

7. So my run data is not very precise. About 3.5 miles, easy pace. I went out around five, feeling hungry and thirsty and tired and altogether low-energy. Just warming up by the time I was nearing home, I did not have time for a long one! Did some strides at the end, reminding myself what 7:40 pace feels like.

8. Part of mental insanity symptom is that I am thinking about a million different contradictory training things! I want to run long and slow, I want to run fast intervals, I started second-guessing myself (but have now stopped!) on which fall marathon to run, etc. etc. etc. However I feel I sorted a number of useful things out, with the help of a lot of very patient e-mails full of Caymanian expertise.

9. I hereby firmly state that I will not race the Brooklyn half-marathon on May 3. I will do it as a STAID AND SEDATE training run at 10:00 pace!

10. Post-run, I forgot to drink any juice (the lure of e-mail!) and it was already time to go and swim. Under-fueled!

11. Nice swim, though!

12. Tomorrow's rest day is probably not going to help my mental insanity, though who knows, peace and quiet might be beneficial. Saturday's exercise schedule should calm me down: run 12 miles, slow, in the morning, and then go and do a race-specific swim in the afternoon. The plan: warm up with some freestyle drill, then do 5 x 500 at a very comfortable speed with only maybe 10 seconds rest. Concentrate on technique and even pacing.

Today's swim:

600 warmup as follows:

300 choice (I did 100 free, 100 back, 100 IM)
200 kick-swim by 50 (fly, breast)
100 build (but instead I did freestyle drill--right arm, left arm, full catch-up, swim)

4 x

100 free
75 breast
50 back
25 fly

(I just did 10 seconds rest for the first two times through and five seconds for the second two rather than worrying about intervals)

Not enough time to do a proper job with the last bit, so I just did 200 free cruise, 4 x 25 drill, 50 build and then it was time to stop. Call it 1950.