blog

Having survived one three-day week of this semester thus far, I'm feeling a little wary. I am constantly running from work to class to work to class to meetings to sleep, with not a whole lot of time for actual homework or studying in between. I feel this will get to be a problem. We shall see.

In other news, the first day of training for Austin FIT (with the overall goal of completing the Austin Half Marathon) was on Saturday. I had killed my feet with heels for an entire day on Friday, so that part was difficult, but I ran the timed mile like I supposed to and hopefully my time will continue. I currently run a 12:10 mile which I know is slow, but for me it's about what I expected. The goal of bigger importance is certainly distance, but I'm hoping to get to a 11:30 minute mile or so by the end of training. I'm just glad I got my butt out of bed and went to train! That was the biggest hurdle.

What I loved about running even just the mile was that it's so difficult for me that all I can do is keep breathing. I'm literally so focused on "okay, breathe in, okay, breathe out.... need more oxygen!" that I can't think about anything else. I know that if I pace myself by keeping my breathing as slow and deep as possible, I will run for much longer. It's when you let your breathing catch and stop getting enough air that you are forced to stop. All other thoughts literally can't enter my mind. Helps me block out the stress, thus far at least. Is this what other runners who love running are talking about? I'm not sure, but right now it works for me.

Last week was the first week of my internship. It went reasonably well, I thought. I was asked to write a press release on my first day!! This made me very nervous since I've never actually written one before, only worked with them in theory, or worked with releases I didn't write. I do feel however that this is the best way to learn, to be pushed into doing something you're unfamiliar with until you GET familiar with it. The actual writing of it took me about three hours, and I haven't gotten her feedback yet so I'm waiting to see how many flaws it had (or strengths.... I guess that's possible). I should also mention that my mentor seems incredibly cool and (from what I can see online) is a contributor to a bunch of different fun blogs and news sources (such as Austinist) which I think is admirable/goes above and beyond her job description. I did mail a bunch of things as well, but it's certainly a step up from getting coffee or dry cleaning, and I know internships like that do exist. Besides, the mailing was genuinely a learning process as well.