Running Log

Pregnancy brain is a real thing. I didn't believe it until I experienced it. Walk into a room and immediately forget why you're there enough times, and you'll become a believer too.

To keep from forgetting lunch dates and doctor appointments, I hung a calendar in my kitchen. An actual paper calendar, something I stopped using even before I got a smartphone.  Now I forget nothing...unless I forget to write it down. That's happened. As an added bonus (a pregnancy perk?), I've found it to be extremely useful for tracking my running.

I've never been good at running logs. Those free training calendars you get for renewing your Runner's World subscription, the kind with motivational quotes and blanks for things I didn't care to record, would sit on my desk at the start of every year, staring at me in hopeful anticipation, then in judgmental scorn when I failed to use them. Eventually, I would chunk them in the trash so they would stop mocking me. The only time I've ever successfully kept up a streak of recording my workouts (and diet and sleep) was my freshman year of college when my coach made me do it, because I wasn't improving and I kept getting sick. It lasted about two weeks, and we came to the conclusion I wasn't getting enough rest.

Since then, even with the helpful invention of smartphone calendars and apps like Runtastic and Map My Run, I haven't managed to be consistent about tracking my training. Until now. It turns out, all I had to do was go old-school. It helps that the calendar hangs right by the microwave, where I spend probably too much time heating up leftovers and reheating my coffee in the morning. So while I'm waiting, I write down what I did for a workout that day, and any relevant notes about it. Then I can add up weekly and monthly mileage. Right now, it's interesting to see how my running has changed over the past few months of pregnancy. I plan to keep it up afterward--tracking my return to training should be fun!