There was a couple of old friends visiting over the weekend and while I had already warned them before they arrived that I am not like I was back when we used to hang in college, I ended up succombing to peer pressure and the fact that I was genuinely having a great time catching up with some people that I used to be regularly very irresponsible with on a regular basis in my 20's.
By the time they said "one for the road!" for the 4th time I had to put a stop to that nonsense. When I input my information in the MyFitnessPal app that I use for calorie tracking, I saw that I was 500 calories OVER my daily limit of 2050 calories and was sitting in my house thinking "I can totally run that off right now."
It might not have been the best choice, but it was a choice that I made and gosh darnit, I can be very stubborn when I decide that I am going to do something.
That image is taken from a really entertaining article that I read about a drunk guy who joined a running race in flip flops and managed to keep up with the people who were in the race all the way to the end. He didn't win, but people noticed him and congratulated him with a medal for making it all the way. The cool side of this story was that being recognized for his achievement encouraged the man to change his life and now he runs regularly.
Well nobody was going to give me a medal last night that's for sure but since I started running so late I didn't actually encounter many other people on the trail and that's probably why I decided to take my shirt off... which is something I almost never do when running.
The pace I started out at felt a bit rushed and I was kind of impressed when my watch told me the stats on the first km and found out that I was only moving a tiny bit slower than I normally would do and this was with a belly full of beer.
I have this thing that I do lately where no matter what I am feeling like, I strive to mentally get past the barricade of stopping before hitting 5km. I really feel like a lot of running is psychological. You aren't really as tired as your brain is telling you nor are you gassed out or experiencing muscle fatigue, you are just trying to quit because you are being lazy... or at least that is the way I look at it.
Semi-drunk me is actually pretty motivated to not give up though especially when I would encounter someone else on the trail that probably didn't have 8 lagers that night.
I did manage to keep a reasonable tab on my heart rate as well, which is something I always do when I am sober but I wasn't actively monitoring it the other night. It's kind of good to know that I can just "feel" my way to the type of heart rate that I am looking for. I may have stepped a bit far into anaerobic but I know why this is: It was because other people were around and I was trying to not look drunk
By the time I was done my app was kind of proud of me and also when I dug a bit deeper it was stating that at least for the past week, my overall training load is really high,perhaps even a little bit too high.
I don't know who comes up with these things though, I don't feel like it is possible to overtrain when you are only doing around an hour of cardio a day. I guess I'll find out when I hurt myself.
I am not encouraging anyone to go drunk running. Obviously there are more bad things that can happen than good but when I saw that i was 500 calories over on the day I was not going to allow that to stand. But the time I was done I had managed to be in a 100 calorie deficit and while I do aim for 300-500 deficit per day to get my weight down to get more speed, I think I did pretty well considering that the rest of my day was rather irresponsible.
The run had another effect though and that was that I probably sweat out or had my body consume all the alcohol becuase the following morning I felt just fine!