Reunited...

...and it feels...okay. Not too bad, anyway.

Yes, that's right. My old friend/nemesis Running and I are back together again. I meant to start up on Monday, but I've been battling the Insane Death Plague (okay, just a bad cold) since about the moment my semester ended. Why does that always happen? Does my stress hold an impending illness at bay until the moment my obligations lift? Or does the mounting stress of end-of-semester duties actually create illness? Either way, it stinks. Every single time over the last four years at the moment I hand in that final paper or file my grades, I get sick.

So, anyway. I was sick on Monday and chose a morning nap over a morning run, thinking I'd get it in after the kids went to bed, but then I had forgotten about Jeff's Monday night softball game...so that didn't happen. I started today instead.

I'm not really back into training per se. Today I ran for five minutes, walked for three, ran five, walked three, ran five. I'll probably do that until it feels easy-ish, and then increase the running times or add another running interval. The next 5k I'd like to run is mid-June, which is coming up fast. However, I learned from the last one that I can manage to pull out a pretty surprising performance on the day, so I'm not freaking out about getting up to 5k distance by the date of the run.

In other (but related) news, it sure doesn't take long to gain back weight and lose muscle tone. I took about a month off from running, and was eating junk the last two weeks, and I look just terrible. Why is it so easy to put it back on, but so dang hard to lose it?