Day 87 - Adjustment

Well, it's kind of pathetic that it's been 22 days since my last post and in that time I've only gone running 3 times. My training schedule says I should have gone 15 times. :S Oh well. 3 is better than 0!! (not much, but still...)

Okay, so day 69 was a Saturday. I was up in Salt Lake visiting my family the weekend before Christmas. My mom has been running too, so I thought it would be fun to go with her. But when it came down to it, I REALLY did not want to go out in that frigid frigid cold, nasty, smoggy weather. So I decided not to. But then, after running an errand on Saturday morning, when I walked in the house first thing my mom said to me was, "want to go for a run?" grrrr. No, I didn't. But I did have a window of time and I had brought my running clothes. I really didn't have an excuse. So we went to Liberty Park and went around the loop two times. In between a walking warmup, bathroom break and cool down walk, we ran around the loop a full time without stopping. The whole thing took us around 55 minutes, 20 minutes longer than I had planned on running. When we finished and I realized I had ran a lot longer than was on my schedule that day, I said, "so you're telling me I ran longer than I had to!?" But of course, as always, it did feel good. Mapping it out later on www.mappedometer.com/ I found we had run about 3 miles.

Day 72 I got a text from a friend that said "anyone want to go running tonight around 6?" I texted back, "I'll go." Note that I said I will go, not that I wanted to go. I must admit, I was super grumpy just before going because my husband had spit my dinner out in the sink because he thought it tasted moldy. And it was fa REEEZ ing outside. Nonetheless, I bundled up and went over to her house. I made it no secret that I didn't want to go, but said, "I've gotten myself this far..." She didn't want to go either, but got dressed and the two of us went out to brave the cold. Thankfully I had a warm headband I had left at her house that she gave me because I wore it over my face the whole time so just my eyes were peeking out. It was so cold!!! We walked 5, ran 25 and walked 5. And it felt good to have done it.

Then came Christmas and New Years and I did not so much as put on a tennis shoe.

On Monday, day 85, my 5K running partner posted this on Facebook: "Totally ran 4.3 miles today. I'm feeling pretty stoked." And yet again, here she is inspiring me to stick this out. Last night I realized I'm pretty behind in my training. She's up to 4 miles and the most I've done was 3 and that was only once, and I didn't run the whole time. I also calculated that there's only 5 weeks until I'm supposed to run a 10K. 6.2 miles. GULP. So, I decided to make some adjustments to my training schedule from now until then in hopes to get me ready.

I'm proud to say that I went out with my kids today and completed 3.5 miles in 55 minutes. I walked for 7 minutes, then began running and was ready to die after 22 minutes. So I completed the rest of the route with a combination of running and walking. And I've decided that I'm totally okay with that. I am totally cool with not running for long stretches at a time. I will still try to push myself farther than I feel like going (and I definitely did that today), but I won't feel bad if I need to walk a little bit every now and then. If I were to do the 10K at my pace today I estimate it would take me 1 hour and 37 minutes. So if I can finish it in less than that amount of time then I will be a happy camper, knowing that I've made progress!

Oh and P.S. I must say that the 66 degree weather I ran in today is the kind of January I'm talking about!!!