If you couldn't tell from my hiatus last week, Life happened (as it tends to do) so blogging fell to a lower priority than normal. Hopefully you didn't miss me and my crazy too much !
My head is constantly in 15 different places and usually those places aren't where I need to be at the time. Go figure. I left/went back into my apartment 3 times this morning because I would grab something and leave something else and have to go back and grab that. Monday's and I are just not friends. Add to that the fact that I will do anything and everything to procrastinate getting to work: I drag my feet at the coffee shop, check my phone a million times, find people to talk to - anything ! and I'm just as surprised as you are that I actually GET to work. So I give myself a pep talk in the car on the drive to work and I come in all ready to go and then...people. I hate my job because the higher ups make my job WAY harder than it needs to be and completely ignore me when I tell them this or give them suggestions to fix it. Le Sigh.
Oh well. Such is life and it pays the bills for now. Just needed to get that off my chest before diving into fun updates about half marathon training !
After an obnoxious phone call last week, I'm more determined than ever about my half marathon. Not that I wasn't before, but hearing that I can't or won't finish this half marathon or the assumption that I keep joking about "actually doing this", my focus kicked into overdrive and I'm more pumped and determined than ever. And yes, all of the work I've been doing has been so I could run a half marathon, but it's that time where I look at City of Oaks being 12 weeks away and having a very real goal with an end in sight. That being said, last week was my first official week of half-marathon training !
Normally all of my runs are around 3 miles because honestly I've never pushed myself out of my comfort zone to try and run more for fear of not being able to do it and also for fear of hurting myself. Last Monday I challenged myself to run the whole 3 miles-no walking. I've been doing run-walk intervals to keep an eye on my IT bands and also because the weather was torture and I didn't want to die. Now that the weather is no longer a suffocating blanket of humidity and my lungs can actually breathe air without being on fire, I decided why not ?! I totally did a victory dance when I got back to my car. Not only did I run the whole time, but I was pretty consistent !
(The cabbage patch happened. Not even gonna lie.)
I cross trained on Wednesday, went back to interval training on Thursday, and had my PT on Friday. I was thinking about doing my long run on Satursday, but I usually try not to run on the same day I go see Jessica and she works on my legs, because when she worked on them after the Raleigh's Finest 5K, I could barely walk (let alone run) for 4 days. Which meant that Sunday was my first long run ! My "coach" had me run for 45 minutes and I decided on 4:1 intervals so my brain could process the math easier.
May I present to you, for the first time since I wiped the slate clean back in June, my first official long run: