Rolling along ….

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

It’s been a busy week and, unfortunately, it’s been the kind of busy that results in nothing really to show for all the stuff I’ve done. So, here it is Wednesday night and I’m trying to get a blog post done so that I can’t distract myself from work tomorrow. Bob always says that our house is never cleaner than when I have a due date riding on my back.

This morning I had to get up at about 4:30 so that I could lift weights and get in some time on the elliptical before the sun came up. That’s the kind of week I’ve had. But, on the flip side, it meant I actually got to go for an afternoon run today! And … we had steak and salad for dinner which is one of my most favorite meals of all time.

My return to some sort of training has been going much better than I ever would have guessed. That’s encouraging. I ran last week’s 50K long run in a surprising 3:37. I decided that I should skip the long run this week because they have been getting faster each week, I’ve been adding to my hill bounding each week, and the tempo runs have been going well (with the exception of Saturday’s 5K tempo when the miles and paces caught up with me, which doesn’t need to be hashed out here except to say I crawled in with a 6:40 last mile – ugh).

So, knowing that I would be sans long run tomorrow, I decided to get in my 10 mile loop and do a nice tempo on it. I call the loop Lake Orange 10 or LO10 for short. It’s part single track trails with makeshift foot bridges over the swampy area, part dirt farm roads, part paved road, and some rolling terrain. It’s my fave run at home and it’s literally steps out my front door. I’ve run this loop for years now and my best time on it stood at 66:30. As soon as I got started today, I thought, hmmm I might be able to give that old best a run for the money today. And, before I knew it … game on. We runners, we be sick! Who the hell races themselves against a random stopwatch time on a course at home??? But, I completely surprised myself with a 64:33! I walked inside the house and announced to Bob: I’m ready to race! His reply: oh, okay. Bob is not a runner. That was probably obvious.

As much as I’d like to run a 50K tomorrow, I won’t. I’ll skip the long run this week and get back to it next week. My body will be secretly happy about it. It’s all good because I am so swamped with work to get done anyway and, well, 50K eats up a good bit of the morning. But, I’m really the only one in the house who knows how time consuming it is because of the practice of sneaking in the long runs discussed in an earlier blog post. Another bonus to skipping the long run is not having to run 50K in 20 degrees tomorrow morning. Plus, I can get a little more sleep in the morning. Hmmm, I think I might have some idea how I ended up not training anymore. I remember a running friend once told me that he figured out how to avoid injuries for certain: don’t run.

Well, that’s where the week stands for now. Time to take a quick shower and go to bed early!

Happy trails!
Missy