Helloooo everyone! It is another glorious Saturday. The weather today sure is gloomy looking outside but that makes me feel less guilty about snuggling up under a blanket. Today is my fiance’s birthday and we are getting ready to celebrate tonight! His favorite color is yellow so we are trying to brighten the place up inside and hopefully the weather can follow our lead. I finished my long run of 8 miles this morning and am ready to help celebrate with 8 desserts tonight to replace those calories 😉
This week was another successful week in terms of the training plan! It felt great to jump back on the bandwagon after a weird week with missed workouts last week. My weakness has always been coming back to training after missed workouts. It is so much easier for me to skip a workout once I have already missed one, and the more I miss the easier it becomes. I am proud of myself for getting back to training right away and not making any excuses for myself. I find that I am in a much better place mentally when I am working out consistently – I feel better about myself, I am more productive, and the stresses and struggles of work seem to be less significant.
Since I made my training plan myself, it doesn’t necessarily follow any specific pattern. I’ve found that I do best with long runs that consistently build up for a few weeks, and then have a cut back week or two before jumping back up to where they were. Based on this, I made my training plan so it would do exactly this. My long runs have built up from 6 to 10 miles these past few weeks, then this week and next we are a cut back week of 8 and 9 miles. After this I have my peak week of 12 miles, followed by a period of taper just before the race. Since I only had about 9 weeks to train my plan only had one period of build up, but for the next marathon I will make sure to have multiple different build up weeks (plus the miles have to build up to a much higher mileage, so it’ll take longer anyways;)
Right now I have been running only 3 days a week – one speed workout, one easy run and one long run. I think my body is responding really well to this! The other 3 days I am filling with cross training – spin, Iron Strength (full body) and Kayla Itsines’ BBG (abs and arms). I plan to stick with this even when I up the training to marathon plans. I think part of my problem with plateauing in the past has been too many junk miles. I am really trying to give purpose to each of my runs and so far I am loving it. My elbows are still giving me some woes and I just can’t seem to shake this for good. I have no idea what is causing them to be painful and unable to straighten/bend and it just seems so random to me. This week was full of modified burpees and planks in my workouts because I can’t use my arms fully.
I can’t believe there are only 3 more weekends before the half I will be running! 2017 is flying by already. Tonight we will be going out with most of our bridal party for the wedding which will be fun. A lot of my friends have not met the groomsmen so it will be funny to watch them all get to know each other.
I hope you all are enjoying the weekend and looking forward to the warmer temperatures that are around the corner with Spring! I sure love winter but this is always the time when it starts to get gloomy and I’m always looking for some sunshine and warmth. We will be there soon!
