Half Marathon Week 11

I am back on the wagon of running. After two weeks of absolutely no running (with no good excuse, when considering my goal of a half marathon), this week I ran, and I ran a lot!

The plan looked like:
Tuesday - 4 miles
Thursday - 5 miles
Saturday - 5 miles
Sunday - 11 miles

I go a jump start for the week on Monday. My friend asked me to go and run our Rancho run, I figured it would be a fun way to reinvigorate my running spirit. The result was a great workout of running/hiking intervals for a total of 5.5 miles.

On Tuesday I was thankful that I had run on Monday. I was not feeling well, had actually stayed home from work, and somehow needed to run 4 miles. Well that wasn't going to happen, but in the afternoon I managed to get myself out of the house and cover 3 miles, half running and half walking. Definitely better than nothing.

I managed to get Thursday's run completed before work. 5 miles as prescribed, done early so I wouldn't have to worry about it after a late afternoon meeting at work.

Yesterday I should have just gotten out of bed and done my 5 miles again. But I did not. We had plans to meet a friend at 8:45 in San Francisco and a few other things. By the time I was home and ready to run it was almost 5. I could have ran, but decided not to in an effort to preserve myself for 11 miles today. A good decision I think. My legs would have still been tired this morning if I had run late yesterday.

Long run turn around view.

So today is the day it was really all about. I can prep for a half marathon and miss some of the shorter miles and be okay, but to not hit the longer runs would not be beneficial to me at all. Today's 11 miles felt totally badass, or rather they made me feel like a badass! The first mile was easy and immediately after it I started telling myself, 'you're so close, just a few more like this and you'll have it in the bag' HAH!! just a few more, right. I've realized a little benefit to running the same trail like I do, especially the way that I always run out half of my goal distance and turn around; I am very familiar with my course, so when I add mileage (like the 3 I added today), the 'new' ground I cover is in the middle of my run, and by the time I am actually running the additional miles I am back in my homestretch where I would be hard pressed to give up, where I am also so comfortable that I can tick off the quarter mile increments by a particular tree or bush. Today's turn around spot was another interesting view, crossing under the convergence of Highways 101 & 85, an interesting change from my last turn around spot. Well my legs got wobbly by mile 7, this run has led me to resolve to get a camelpack, and most of all I survived!!

Tired, but alive... post 11 miles. Stretched out at a park table, and then had a brief rest on the table.

The rest of today is dedicated to eating yummy food, Left Bank for lunch and homemade Eggplant Parmesan for dinner. Oh and laundry, of course laundry.

My stats immediately after the run... think I'm going to be okay.

Half Marathon - Week 7

Ok. So I'm committed to running the Capitola Half Marathon on May 19. So committed in fact that I am following a training plan to help get me there. Before starting the training plan the longest I had run was a 5k, so I needed something to help me baby step my way to 13 miles. Today is the end of week 7 of the 16 week training plan that I am following (the plan came from Runkeeper, though I track my activity with Nike+ now).

I already have a planner (hard copy & google) dedicated to scheduling the runs and other activities that I should be doing for my plan. But I decided to add one more step to the accountability system and share it here. So be on the lookout for weekly running progress updates.

So now here we go with Week 7! The plan looked like this:

Ignore the sad faces... Runkeeper is sad that I didn't complete the runs, but I just didn't track them in Runkeeper. So this week should have totaled out at 21 miles. What I did though was 14.

Tuesday didn't start out well, I woke up with a bunch of sore back muscles,capped off with an extremely 'stuck' feeling on my right hip. The stuck situation is something I've had periodically for a few years now. I don't have a lot of mobility/flexibility in my right hip, so you mix in a lower back muscle knot and what I get is 'stuck'. I've got a routine of things that I do to release the stiffness and the knots. Nonetheless, come Tuesday afternoon when I headed out for 4 miles, I just couldn't get there. Every step was reverberating through the hip/low back area so I called it good at 2 miles of running. I came home and stretched it all out, then went for another mile of walking around the lake with my cousins.

Thursday just didn't happen. It was a board meeting at work, and even with Daylight Savings time, I didn't get home with enough time to run and do the household things I needed to get accomplished; I made the plan adjustment to move it to Friday. But then Friday came, a crazy day at work (my BFF's last) so again by the time I got home I just couldn't get the run in.

Saturday though was wonderful!! Up and at 'em to run first thing in the morning. Got all 4 miles in and I felt good the whole way. The hip/back problems were nowhere in sight. Came home and spent the afternoon pulling out our blackberry bramble and our guava tree - my total calorie burn was over 3000 for the day (which is over 500 beyond the target).

Today was another fantastic run!! There's a feeling of 8 miles being some kind of 'marker' for the progress to date. A sort of 'well if you can do 8; 13 is a no brainer'. So today running 8 miles for the first time was a great feeling of accomplishment. I missed last week's 7 miles, so I jumped from a 6 mile longest distance to 8 miles.

This is the meadow that served as today's 4 mile turn around point. Loved seeing the abundance of yellow. My favorite thing about running on Coyote Creek Trail for all of my workouts is that you can easily forget that you are running within the 10th largest city of the country, instead it's like being in the beautiful wild of Northern CA. Nevermind that 101 is a few hundred yards to the right of this view.

By the very end of my 8 miles I had a little bit of soreness developing in my calves and knees. The worst thing though was that I was running in a ribbed tank (which I have worn for shorter runs plenty of times), but for the 8 mile distance it was the wrong shirt. I am now chaffed on the inside of both of my arms from rubbing against the ribbing. Lesson learned.

So I made 14 of 21 miles for the week, and that is still 14 more than I was running a year ago so I'm pleased. I've post run stretched, had a cool shower, awesome brunch, and now to relax with laundry and a visit to some bunnies who will be coming home to us soon. (Pictures of them to come sometime soon).