A bad cardio session is still a cardio session

I've been involved in physical fitness for a long time. There have been days that happen that just don't make any sense where my performance is just all off and not good and it doesn't make any sense because I have been eating right, i've been exercising looking for slight progression for a while now, and I have been doing it consistently. Some days the body just doesn't feel like it I guess.

At least that has been the story for me.

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Yesterday was one of those days for me. Something that I do often that is normally not something I consider difficult at all was really difficult. For me this was just a light gym session that was really short followed by a 5k job at a light pace.

The gym session was interrupted by a number of things. One was that everyone and their cousin was in the gym and I should have seen that coming because the "new year new me" people were all at the gym on January 2nd. I got frustrated with the lack of protocol and just the abundance of people so I left. I'm going to have to remember to stay away from my big gym for the next few weeks because we all know that those people are not going to be there after that.

The next thing was the run. It was quite difficult to even get motivated to get out the door and this is not an unusual situation to find myself in. I am no stranger to this sensation.

This was the same route that I always take for this run and lately I have been kind of pleased about how it was starting to look like I was ready to extend to a 6 minute 30 per km pace as I have lately been nailing a slightly-sub-7-minute per km pace in my last 10 runs or so. Yesterday, the body just wasn't having it.

It wasn't a question of me not pushing it either, I was constantly monitoring the heart rate and making sure I didn't push too far into Anaerobic territory. You can see there is a dip at around 4km there though, and that is where I stopped for a brief breather. I was kind of confused as to what the heck is going on because I shouldn't be having this much trouble with a short run like this.

It started out a bit sloppy and unfortunately it didn't get much better as things went on. I think I tried to run a bit faster on the last km out of some sort of sense of guilt but for me, 7:20 is not a good pace.

To make matters even worse we are now on the day after and I am sore all over my body and especially my left knee is just killing me.

I'm going to listen to my body with this though and take some time off from running and instead focus on stretching and nutrition because perhaps those two things are factors that I am not paying as much attention to as I should be.

I suppose the good news is that this 5k burned just over 400 calories and according to my research that I've been doing, that is exactly what I expected even though in my mind it was a lousy run!