Last week was full of a bunch of ups and downs with running.
I started off with a seven-miler that was the good kind of tough. You know, where it’s hard because you’re pushing yourself. Felt pretty proud of myself.
Then Wednesday’s run was just completely awful. I had ten miles on the schedule, but by the time I had gotten home from work the humidity had climbed to close to 100% thanks to a mini thunderstorm. Things started out okay, but by the mile five it started getting really rough really quick. I stopped for a walk break at seven miles and felt completely drained and defeated. Even though I was still two miles from home, I decided to just throw in the towel, it wasn’t worth it. After walking for a few minutes, I was able to convince myself to at least run one more mile to get myself home quicker. After getting home, I was feeling really awful about myself. I told my wife I thought it was time to take an honest look at my goals for this race and maybe admit this was a mistake.
Luckily, Thursday gave me exactly what I needed, when I needed it. I was feeling pretty down on myself about running and was still super bloated from a way-too-big lunch earlier. On top of that, all I wanted to do was go to bed since I had to go into work an hour earlier and was exhausted. I had low hopes for this run, but, just before hitting two miles, everything just snapped right into place and I felt on point. I felt strong and fast and decided to go with it. I had seven miles with 8x1’ fartleks scheduled, but I had decided beforehand to skip the fartleks and make up Wednesday’s missed two miles instead.
When I hit mile five, I decided I was going to throw those fartleks in and I’d just count it out in my head rather than stop and set up my phone with the timer. After doing the second one, I realized I didn’t want to bother with the recovery and just wanted to run hard for the rest of the run so I turned it into a tempo run instead. I walked away from this one with a solid runner’s high and the confidence boost I needed.
Saturday’s 15-mile long run was a little better than my 13-mile one from a week before in terms of pace, but I started running out of steam pretty badly at the end. I fought through it though! And, finally, Sunday’s run was a nice easy recovery with my new Garmin Forerunner 220! I’ll probably post about the 220 a bit in depth after running with it more.
And with that, June and the first half of 2014 are all wrapped up! I CANNOT believe this year is half over already! On the running front, I racked up 966 miles which is utterly bonkers! That’s less than 270 away from my all time high for an entire year! I was sort of hoping to get to 1,000 miles since I’m gunning for 2,000 on the year, but I think I’m still in a good position to pull that goal off. Anyway, for as many ups and downs as I’ve had with running in the last six months, I’ve gotta say that it’s been a solid year so far!
After Saturday’s run, my wife and I went down to Princeton to celebrate her 28th birthday. We got dinner at Triumph, one of our favorite restaurants and breweries. Unfortunately, our very friendly server wasn’t too good at remembering our orders and forgot to put in our appetizer and put my meal in wrong. Still, dinner was delicious and each washed it down with a sampler of the seven beers currently on tap there. Afterwards, we walked around a bit and then hit up the Bent Spoon for some delicious ice cream.
Sunday was mostly spent relaxing and doing about half the chores around the house that I had planned on doing.
This week is a repeat of last week’s training, as far as the calendar is concerned. I’m going to tweak Thursday and Friday a bit since Friday is the 4th of July and we’ll be running the Cranford Firecracker 4-miler for the sixth year in a row! I decided I’m going to try to race it hard and see what I can do since I don’t have a lot of race times since transitioning.
