As an accountant, tax season is my life from January 1 to April 15. Obviously, very little else happens. It’s a struggle to stay sane, to get any sort of housework done, to get the Christmas Tree taken down (this happened the evening before Easter), to do anything resembling normal.

We knew we’d have to get up early and go to the gym in order to get in any workout. Working out at the end of a 10+ hour day just doesn’t happen. We had started getting up early and going to the gym in December in preparation. Because if you practice things, and do them all the time, eventually they’ll get easier, right?

Apparently that’s not true for getting up at 6AM and going to the gym. It will never get easier. It sucks every time. And while you feel good about it afterward, that doesn’t keep you from hating it the next morning, or the next.

Despite this, I had an incredibly productive tax-season, running-wise. I focused on short distances and speed. I still ran about 6 miles on the weekends, but never more than about 4.5 during the week. And I really did get faster. On April 15, I hit 250 miles run for the year. This has set me up to run 1000 miles this year, though I have to admit I’m going to have to step it up a notch in the second half of the year (since it’s now the end of May) for that to happen.