Back on Track!

Miles in 2014: 93.3

Days until Nike DC Women’s Half Marathon: 89

After over a whole week of rest after the Dopey Challenge, I hopped right back on board with training!  Tuesday I opted out of the track workout and chose to do mile repeats instead to work my tired legs back into running.  Thursday we did our "hill loop" with a hill repeat thrown in.  This week we also switched our intervals from 3:1's to 4:1's.  When I first started running two and a half years ago I struggled with the 3:1. Most days I could not run an entire 3 minute interval to save my life.  It took me a very long time before I was able to complete the bulk of my training runs where I was able to run the 3:1 interval for the entire time.  As we have been training this past season we came to the realization that we are reaching a point with our running that we will be unable to run those 3 minutes much faster than we are and the only way to continue improving our times is to increase our running intervals.  After the Dopey we agreed to try and bump them up to 4:1's and then again to 5:1's by the end of the session.  While the 4's were challenging, I was able to run all of my intervals for our 2 week day workouts and our 8 mile run on Saturday.  It really seems to be a much easier transition that I had expected.

Saturday was the first weekend long run of the season and I am a group leader I had to go to the run even though I had a race the following day.  We had a great run at a comfortable pace which was great since many of us are either still recovering from recent races or just coming back to training.

First Weekend Run of Amanda & Leah's official group!

The next day was the Inaugural Celebration Half Marathon.  We had a huge group running the race and I truly loved this event.  The course was pretty and well supported.  We ran our 4:1 intervals for the first half of the race before switching back to 3:1's. At mile 10 we decided to walk it in the rest of the way to help Leah's knee which is still a little tender after her tumble at Dopey.  The after party had a great sampling of food from all of the local Celebration business.  Overall it was a great race.

What a great group!

Amy captured this classic cup toss of me!

This week it's back to work.  I need to continue cleaning up my diet for sure.  It's amazing what an important role that plays in this.  Tomorrow's track combo workout looks BRUTAL but I'm interested to try it out.  Thursday is our usual neighborhood run.  Saturday I'm headed to Safety Harbor for the Best Damn Race.  Last year this was a great event so I am definitely looking forward to running it again.  There are 6 of us running the half and another friend will be running his first 10k ever!  I'm so proud of this accomplishment and I hope I can beat him back to the finish line to see him cross (I'm gonna have to run really fast to achieve that!)  I know I have lots of other friends running the 5k and 10k so I hope to see them all there!