Trying to get back on the horse

So this week got off to a good start, and then I got swamped with work on Thursday, and that pretty much ruined it.

Monday, Sept. 1: Ran down to the school and back. Felt pretty good. (11.0 miles)

Tuesday, Sept. 2: Short day today (4.0 miles)

Wednesday, Sept. 3: Dave's apartment loop 2 (7.5 miles)

Thursday, Sept. 4: This is where everything went to shit. I got swamped with work today and stayed up until 3:00 in the goddamn morning finishing all of it. Goddamn my academic ambition. Didn't run today.

Friday, Sept. 5: Woke up very tired today. Ran Dave's apartment loop 2 again. This run kinda sucked. (7.5 miles)

Saturday, Sept. 6: Felt like shit today, and still have a lot of lot of work left to do. I'll go for a run later tonight when I wake up. (Later: Just did Dave's apt. loop 2 again. This one actually went pretty well, I thought, given how horrible/dead I felt earlier today. 7.5 miles)

Total weekly miles: 37.5

I was going for 40 miles this week, so I'm not off by much, but I'm still kinda pissed that I didn't quite get there (I'd have been comfortably over if I hadn't been swamped on Thursday). Really, I view the next few weeks' training as at least as much mental as physical: there are going to be many opportunities between now and February for slacking off or rationalizing my innate laziness, and I need to get in to the habit of formulating weekly and daily goals and sticking to them if I want to have any chance of success. So it's not so much the fact that I'm 2.5 miles short (which in the grand scheme of things really won't make a difference) as much as it's an indication that I failed in reaching my goal this week that's bothering me about this. On the other hand, my plan is to increase my weekly mileage by around 3 miles/week between now and mid-October, so if I stick to this daily mileage schedule next week (and include a run on Thursday), I should easily be able to get my mileage goal next week. On a related note, I think I should probably look around for another couple runs that I can do, because I think I'm very quickly going to get bored with these. I'm planning to start running from campus earlier in the day (rather than my apartment) as soon as it starts to cool down, since this means that I'll have a more interesting variety of things to run by (since UT is right in the middle of downtown Austin, almost immediately adjacent to the state capital), and also that I'll be running earlier in the day at a fixed time, so it will fit into my daily schedule much more conveniently than it is now, and at a fixed time, too.