I just got back from the gym, where I forced my way through W6D3. However, I'm going to quit running for a while. I don't think it will be very long pause, but the big monolithic runs are wiping me out in a way that doesn't feel entirely healthy to me. I'm pretty sure it's another round of low blood pressure. I get light-headed as soon as I get off the treadmill, and I wind up spending five or ten minutes sitting on a bench before I can even make my way to the locker room.

So, in the interest of trusting my intuition and not doing stupid shit, I'm going to quit running until I can have a chat with my doctor about this, or more precisely until I can do something about it. That probably only means four or five days, maybe a week. And I might not even call a complete halt to it, but if I feel like running before this gets sorted out I'll go back and do an easier day, maybe my old friend week 4.

Once we deal with the issue, my plan is to repeat week 5. If the 20-minute run at the end feels OK, I'll skip over week 6 and start in on week 7. Repeating week 5 will let me work my way up to the monolithic runs, and let me test the waters to see if I feel better.

This feels like a reasonable and sane plan to me. Anyone have opinions?


Tonight's rationalizations were same-old. "Dude, you did ten minutes the other day. You can do at least that much now." "Hey, two and a half minutes and you're halfway there." "OK, fine, just go to 15 minutes then quit if you want to." "Hey, 60%. And you did 20 minutes the other day. You can do it again." "OK, five minutes left. No fucking way are you quitting now... do you want to have to do it again? Didn't think so." And then I counted down the last five minutes, and reminded myself that the small amount I had left was easy. It wasn't, of course.