Monday: rest day. Well, a rest day from running, anyways...
Tuesday: was supposed to be an 8 miler, but lack of sleep from the events of Monday left me lagging. This night, I did get a good night's sleep, since both my boys were home and I didn't have to worry about them.
Wednesday: I pulled up my bootstraps and hit the road for that 8 miler. I had an fantastic run, with consistent split times, averaging about 9:10mins/mile, which is about what I wanted for this distance. I felt good. This was the run I needed, the one I've been looking for since coming back from my injury. I was smiling from ear to ear. When I got home, I hit the mat for my scheduled yoga session. I did the SeaWheeze 2014 routine again. And went to work smiling and calm.
Thursday: Once again, I had mile repeats x 5 on the plan. My goal was to get myself through all 5, at a fast pace but with consistent times for all. I met that goal and was happy to see my splits:
That 8:18? Well, I think these look pretty good considering that I've been all over the place with this! My Spotify playlist was great and the last song was Rob Zombie's Never Gonna Stop Me, which spoke volumes to me, and got me home. Nice work, and yes, I'm patting myself on the back. Next up was Crossfit. I don't know what got into Becky. While I was warming up on the rower, I saw her carrying the prowler outside. Ok. When I went outside to start the workout, she strapped the sled to my back. And put a 20# plate on the sled. She had my push the prowler with the sled behind me. O...M...G...! My hamstrings were screaming! When I finished after my first lap, I fell to the ground. She started laughing while I caught my breath. Holy sh**! I did 2 more laps of that and we headed back inside. I was sweating profusely. Actually, I think it was my hamstrings crying.
After the prowler, she had me do progressive deadlifts x 5; 5 sets with max of 115#. In between sets, I did overhead squats with sandbags x 15. And to top it off, I had to do 15 burpees, as fast as I could. Which wasn't very fast. When I got home, I stretched and foam rolled.
Friday: thankfully a rest day. Surprisingly, I wasn't all that sore! My morning in the clinic went smoothly, and I was able to get outside for a brisk 30 minute walk at lunch, which felt great.
Saturday: 5 mile tempo run. Again, working on consistency, I kept my Garmin set on pace instead of miles. I was happy to see this at the end of my run:
It isn't so much the pace that I was excited about, it was the pacing. Not much variation there, and that's what I'm working on! Now if I can bring that to 26.2...
Sunday: Long run of 12 miles on the plan. I started out slower, but still faster than I'd like. My goal pace is 9:30, this run ended up being about 9:20 mins/mile. It felt hard, tho. I'm not sure why--if my legs were tired from the week or if that extra glass of wine I had last night took a toll. The weather was really nice when I started, about 69F and overcast, with a light breeze to keep me cool. It was fairly humid and I really sweated a lot. I also had some issues with my music--somehow a whole album of Incubus songs got downloaded onto my playlist, and I had to keep stopping to fast forward past them. I just couldn't listen to it--this run was too hard and I needed my running music to push me. I fixed that problem when I got home. Kind of interesting, usually when I run at the retention pond where there is a 2 mile path, I'm usually one of the few runners, sharing the path with walkers and bikers. Today there were some speedy runners--I watched them fly by. I had to hold back not to try to keep up with them. I kept telling myself that I'm running long and slow today. My inner competitor wanted to come out, I guess!
So a few things to work on...pacing is improving, for sure, but I still need to focus on that. I need to do more foam rolling and stretching to keep everything loose. Now I'll be increasing my miles, which should help with my confidence.
And I'm hoping for a drama-free week. I'm really glad I was able to push through it. Maybe because this week, my runs were the only thing I could control.