July 25, 2025 - Road to BM HM

If you’re wondering what this is about - One year ago I crawled through a 5K in 50 minutes—now I’m attempting the slightly unhinged goal of running a sub-2-hour half marathon, documented through daily brain dumps complete with training chaos, 5 AM existential crises, random tangents, and way too much heart rate data.

Disclaimer: Posts are lightly edited with LLMs for grammar and spelling, but the sleep-deprived thoughts and stubborn optimism are 100% human.

Sleep: 5h11m – Low
RHR: 60 bpm
HRV: 65 ms

Workout: 7K Zone 2

Pre-run brain dumps

Today, RHR and HRV are both bad — not sure if it’s fatigue. I’m waking up with one nostril blocked. I’m rethinking whether I should try those nose-opening strips. Although, last time they didn’t feel any better — maybe they’re useful now? Because of the blocked nose (which fixes itself after I wake up), I’m also breathing a bit hard.

My sleep stats have been shit consistently. I haven’t been getting enough deep sleep, and I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night to pee. I need to adjust my food and water intake a few hours before bed, and also restart pre-sleep meditation. Medito had a sleep section that really helped. Medito is an open-source meditation app — an alternative to Headspace. Really neat design! I’ll restart that with some sleep hygiene and see where it takes me.

Deload week has been weird — there’s a feeling of drifting away from structure, which I also get during tapering weeks. But I’m hoping it’s just me taking things slowly.

My food has been weird. I end up ordering mostly, although I order grilled chicken from Zaitoon — the last few times I’ve had it at night, I’ve woken up with mild acidity. I’m going to avoid this going forward, and not be lazy about cooking.

The last few days, I haven’t been strict on diet, and I’m also faltering on protein intake.

Today’s workout is zone 2 7K — I want to do like 10K, but it depends on whether I leave at 5:30 AM or not, as that would take around 1.5 hours. 10K zone 2 would be good to get on track. So far my mileage has been only 5K this week, with 4.5K of rowing. Tomorrow’s long run is around 12K. Need to not dip below 30K at least.

Likely, there will be some extra work I’ll need to pick up for the next two weeks for a client who has a launch, and my colleague working on that will have to be away for emergencies. I need to figure out how to handle this, as I’ve been a bit away from that codebase. But it may also be a good opportunity to understand Remix better, make use of Cursor in the existing codebase, and see how to use it effectively. Also, I haven’t shipped anything for a while, so maybe it’s a good thing.

Post-run thoughts

Ran 6.6K in zone 2. Was mostly easy, ran without music — I’m now liking this approach.

Wanted to do more for mileage, but couldn’t.

At the box, we mainly did deadlifts. Today felt weak. Was struggling with 120kg for reps, but completed them. I think it’s mainly about fueling — need to get my diet straight with enough protein and fat.