Sunday, February 13, 2011

Beautiful Weekend Weather!

Stephen and I just returned from a beautiful walk downtown Greenville with our dog Charlie. The weather this weekend has just been gorgeous and has really helped the winter blues to start going away. This brisk walk to the dog park and back helped get my workout week off to a good start. Thanks Stephen for your Sunday morning motivation and energy! Even Charlie seemed to need some real outdoor time. He had great fun romping around with the other dogs.

After the race...
I completed the Green Valley Road Race 8K yesterday and was so proud of Margie and Danielle for completing their 2nd ever race! Mel and Brandon really pushed themselves and finished well ahead! A nice surprise was to see Jessica at the race too!

The course was not well marked at all, so we ended up completing somewhere around 5.3-5.5 miles instead of 5. Jessica ended up doing an extra 2 miles! She was running in the same race and they sent her a different way than us!?? :-( It was weird, but I still had a nice time.

I ended up downtown later in the afternoon because it had finally warmed up from 22 to 53 degrees! Much better than the freezing morning temp! And every family and jogger in Greenville seemed to have the same idea as me; be outside! I ended up briskly walking another 2.9 miles for a total of around 8 miles for the day.

Now that I am tracking my training load points each week, I knew I needed more to reach my goal for the week, so this extra walk got me there. I want to run the 10k I have planned for March 5th with good effort. To do this, I need to be completing between 800 to 1,000 points per week. Last week I logged a total of 831pts and this week was 925! Yeah! :-) By training this way, I can really see how much effort I am exerting and I am very mindful about the effort I put into each workout. I didn't do this before and this is really helpful. I am still using Jeff Galloway's training run distance schedule for the 1/2 marathon (April 30th) and I am doing pretty well with my distance, but I am getting to the point now that I am going to have to step it up even more during the weeks to come. Joining Jessica on Thursday after school for speed/endurance runs will definitely help me here. Now I have had incredible energy this week; I just pray this continues through eating better and getting a good nights sleep.

Thanks to Lauren Runs' latest blog post, I have an idea of how to meet my long run goals and still continue with my Saturday group planned runs when our distance goals are not the same. So this coming Saturday, I am scheduled to train for 8 miles, but we are currently run/walking our upcoming 10k road course. I think I will attempt to go out earlier than normal and run 2 miles before I meet with the group, so that I can log my 8 miles for the day. I wouldn't miss running with my friends on Saturday morning for the world! This is my saving grace and motivation!!! However, the following Saturday calls for a shorter run of 3 miles, so should I meet up with them part way through their run? Hmmm. Reading other blogs and joining SparkPeople.com's 13.1 blog group has helped a ton. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Here's to a great week of warm weather! Boy is it needed. I've had some crappy motivation. It's the people around me completing goals and getting out there that keeps me going, like Mel Edwards and her super amazing goal-setting! Thanks everyone.

3 comments:

  1. I hope you enjoy the warmer weather this week--- I know I'm going to try & get out for some more outdoor runs since we're above 30 degrees!

    Glad to be able to provide some ideas on making mileage when running with a group.

    I haven't yet encountered what to do when your group is running more than your plan, but I think I'd go for whichever is longer. If you're planning to run 3 miles, how much is your group planning on?

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  2. Keep up the motivation sis! I am proud of you!!

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  3. to Lauren...we ran 3.5 yesterday as I had planned and they decided to do that with me. One friend is training for all the same races, and is okay usually with my training schedule, and the other is nursing an injured foot, so she joined us for this short run as well.

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