Failure is most definitely an option.

Well, I had my first official Couch-to-5K FAIL today when I attempted day three of the training. As I mentioned yesterday, Fridays are days off for me, so getting up at 4:50 or 5:00 to go run was just probably never going to happen. Especially since the Heat/Spurs game went so late, and my brother is visiting with his girlfriend and I just didn't want to go to bed and miss out on everything.

I look so cute after exercise.

This morning I woke up (or was woken up by my brother pounding on my door and yelling at me to get up) at 8:15, and around 9:15, I decided to just go do it, regardless of how hot and humid it was outside. So I drove to the hospital to do my training around the pretty trail.

It was only 85 degrees when I started, and I made it through all the walk/run intervals until 55 seconds into running spurt number 7. And then my will to keep pushing myself just disintegrated. I felt like I was going to throw up, it was miserably hot, the sun was beating right down on me, and I just quit. I started walking, and walked through the final running spurt as well. At the time, I felt like I just could NOT keep going, and I resigned myself to it. I had pushed myself through running spurts 3 through 6 even though I wanted to quit then, too, but by the 7th 60-second run, I lost all motivation. I quit with 65 second of running remaining. Really, Me? Really???

Sigh. On the drive home, I decided to get my elliptical trainer back from one of my other brothers (I sold it to him a year ago, but he never uses it), because I am obviously a failure at running. Now that I've cooled off and the nausea his dissipated, I know I shouldn't just throw in the towel so easily, but I do think that having the elliptical would be nice. I can exercise more often, and from the comfort of my air conditioned home.

My body feels like jelly, and it's worse than how I felt on days one and two. Even my wrists and fingers hurt. Does the heat and humidity really make that much of a difference? Then again, I only did like two half-hearted stretches before I left the house.

The jury is out on what I'm gonna do. I guess I should just attempt day three again on Sunday, but this time do it before the sun comes up and conspires to kill me. Do I sound whiny enough? Cause I can try harder if I need to...

Good Stuff:
There are a few teeny victories to report today. First, I lost one of the three pounds that I gained when I started exercising! I was surprised to see that, too, because I felt like yesterday sucked eating-wise. My coworkers begged me to go out to lunch with them to this new, overpriced restaurant, and even though I was careful and ordered a salad, I ate too much. I had a few chips with guacamole before the salad came, ate almost my entire salad and half the dressing, and then I had four bites of a skillet cookie with ice cream that someone ordered because they hate me. Oh my word, it was delicious. After those four bites, I covered my dessert spoon with salt so I wouldn't take any more.

Another good thing is that I've been tracking the workouts I've been doing in my SparkPeople app, and today I saw that I've burned 1,103 calories exercising this week. For some reason, that made me so excited! I think it would be fun to challenge myself with a weekly calories burned total. It seems a lot more motivational than just tracking how many workouts I do.

I'm off to do something inspirational now, like watch episodes of Extreme Weight Loss... I need a little pick-me-up in the motivation department right now.