If someone happens to know some gitlab folks that this may ressonate with that would be cool 😄 . Github has better scheduling than Gitlab so here's my github workflow.

name: trigger gitlab job
on: 
  schedule:
  #At every 23rd minute past every hour from 8 through 17 EST on every day-of-week from Monday through Friday. 
    - cron: "*/23 12-21 * * 1-5"
  workflow_dispatch: 
  
jobs:
  run:
    name: run
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: trigger Job
      run: "curl -X POST -F token=${{ secrets.GITLAB_TOKEN }} -F ref=main <https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/35387178/trigger/pipeline>"

You can not run more than once per hour on gitlab 😭