Weekly Sweats: Another Fast Long Run

This weeks adventures: 25 miles of running, an oops on the weight lifting front, and an unexpectedly fast long run.

I'm linking up with the Weekly Run Down, please head over to Kim and Deborah to check it out.

Monday: 4 treadmill miles easy with strides

Tuesday: 5 treadmill miles, one mile warm up and then a ladder of 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 minutes fast/2 minutes recover

Wednesday: off

Thursday: 5 treadmill miles, one mile warm up and then a ladder of 1-2-3-2-1 minutes fast/2 minutes recover, repeated enough times to get to 3.5 miles and my body let me know it was done so I ran the remainder of the workout easy.

Friday: the struggle bus workout of the week, 3 mile treadmill hills.  The day before was really stressful and I didn't sleep well.  When the alarm went off, I made the judgement call: work out or skip it?  By a narrow margin I decided that my day would be slightly better with the workout over an extra hour of sleep, so I went for it and happily cut it short when my body told me it was done.

Saturday: the pay off!  Last week I was stunned to run 8 miles at an 11:16 pace, and I mentioned that I helped myself out a bit with a flat route.  This week there was no snow on the roads, so I was able to venture further from home and get myself some ups and downs.  I knew it wasn't realistic to expect to run faster than the previous week.  I'd run the same route 3 weeks earlier at an 11:44 pace and I kinda maybe hoped that I could do 11:30 this week.

Hey it may not have been realistic but it became reality: I did a much harder route at an 11:11 pace.

Guys, I am very cautiously optimistic that my running speed is finally improving.  The biggest shout out is mile 6 and I can give you 76 reasons why I loathe and despise that stretch of road (and why I try to run it often on my long runs to get the long continuous uphill).  The last time I clocked that mile at 12:54 and I remember so many times last year during half marathon training when it was a 13:xx.

To be fair, in previous weeks I've had workouts set up on the Garmin that made it difficult to see my mile splits, and for this workout I was watching my pace like a hawk and really pushing it.  And I doubt that I could have kept running at that pace much longer (mile 8 was slower largely due to a traffic light situation).  I'll be stepping up my weekend long run to 10 miles soon so it's inevitable that I'll need to slow down a bit.  BUT with all that aside, I am very happy with this week's long run.

Sunday: normally a rest day, but it was time to deal with the oops on the weight lifting front.  Last year when I started running 5 days a week, I moved my weight lifting workouts to my lunch hour, accepting that there would be missed workouts on busy days.  Well...every work day is getting to be a busy day and I don't see that changing.  So as much as I love spending my Sundays kicked back on the couch, I got up and at 'em for a brief weight workout, and since I'd already taken the trouble to put on a sports bra, I also did a one mile incline treadmill walk.  I plan to rinse and repeat on Wednesday AM, my other dedicated non running day, so we'll see how this pans out.  It's not perfect but something that happens is a lot more perfect than something that doesn't happen.

What's next
I will leave you with the teaser that weather permitting I will be doing something outside of my comfort zone next weekend.  After that the weekend long runs will go up to 10 milers as half marathon #4 in April draws closer.

Update from last week
I loved wearing all of my new threads from my Thred Up haul this week.  I did end up returning the black shorts along with the awful pink top and it turns out that Thred Up has a restocking fee, which I don't remember from previous returns.  But even so, it still made sense to do the return and get credit for a future purchase.