I Probably Should Make My Blog Public again

The first 1/2 of my run was at 9:12 pace.  The second was slightly slower, at 9:24 pace.  The hardest part of it was from mile 7 to mile 8.5.  

Other than that, the run was okay and uneventful.  

Since I didn't have my headphones to distract me, I thought about a lot of things on this run:

1)  I felt slow and unmotivated, and looking back at my own blogs, I sense the pattern that I always feel slow and unmotivated the week before my period.  That's one nice thing about this blog--I have a record of how my workouts went. I think that my pace here was probably slightly under 10 min pace, but only slightly.  I'm glad I didn't bring my watch because I didn't stress about how slow I was going.

2)  I need to do a better job of recording how I feel during a run.  Sometimes on the blog I just write down my distance and pace, and that's not enough for me to analyze a pattern

3)  I like this blog.  Even though my running over the winter was inconsistent because of my early January forced respite, I know I ran more this winter than I have in 3 years (or maybe ever, I'm not sure.  I know that year I was running more miles during January, but I think I lost a little fitness in Feb, then had to rebuild in March).  And I know that part of the fact that I stuck with it, even though I didn't always feel like it was because I knew that Carolyn was going to be commenting on my blog :)

4)  I think I am going to concentrate on keeping fit for 1/2 marathons for the time being.  I don't have the time to be serious about a marathon right now.  While I still feel uncompetetive (and I don't really care that much to BE competetive) I would like to someday actually be able to RACE a 1/2 marathon instead of just being able to run.  I know that this one in April will be one that I just run for the heck of it.

5)  I enjoy running not because I am fast or ever want to be fast, but I am always so thankful that I CAN run.

6)  I'd like to move somewhere it is 70 degrees all year round.  Yesterday was beautiful and sunny (except it was windier than I thought it was going to be).

Four easy miles.  No problems.

I started off slower today, which ended up being an okay thing.  My first 5 miles averaged 9:51 pace. I was feeling a little slow starting out and then I decided that I would keep myself in check for the first 5 and then try to push the pace for the second 5.

I pushed myself for the next 4 and then kinda lost the edge.  At the end of 4 I decided to cool down the last 2 miles instead of the last mile.  Those miles averaged 9 minutes per.  Then the last two averaged 9:30, as a cool down.

If things had gone as planned this week, I would have run 10 more miles during the week.  I took Monday off, as I usually do, forgetting that we had an appointment on Wednesday.  Then on Friday 2 weeks of sleeping with a pair of feet kicking me from 2-5:30 caught up with me.  I crashed on the couch after getting home from school and couldn't motivate myself to get up.  But it's probably just as well.  It would have increased my weekly mileage by a significant amount, which always makes me nervous.

This week, though, I hope to (and know I most likely will) run 6 days this week.  We're on spring break (yay!) so I have a lot more time to get those miles in.  I don't think that it's a good idea to increase my mileage by 25%, although I'd like to run 40 miles this week.  So I might do a couple of runs that are 3 miles instead of the 5 I'd normally do.