Daylight

Sunny days are here again! At least that is my hope. I took my snow pants and ice scraper out of my car this week and moved all our winter jackets hanging in our entry way into the closet to say good bye (and good riddance) to winter.

I've jokingly commented to friends in the past that I think I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I mean, who wouldn't? I've had a rather tough time holding my running together the early part of this year, especially on those cold windy gray days. It's been a see-saw battle. I felt better in early February and ran my goal time in the ValenTimes 10K to get my 500 Festival Mini-Marathon seed time. It went downhill from there again. I've continued logging and blogging my weekly miles. It's all out there. I just haven't been publicly announcing the blog links like I usually do as there's not anything interesting to see... of course then my friend Trena adds an encouraging comment every week telling me someone's out there pushing me along.

Thank you Trena!

Then there's my friend Margo. She's my friend I met through run club. I've always enjoyed having all my online runner friends from the Sole Sister group as well as all my Indiana Timing friends that I get to race with on the weekends but now I have a friend, live and in person, that actually wants to run with me... and has goals even loftier than mine. We run similar paces. I made the "mistake" of telling her that I kinda sorta wanted to try to get a PR at the Mini this year and run under 1:50...

There. I said it. I want to break 1:50 for 13.1 miles. I'd love to do it on the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon course; the course I've run so many times I could run it in my sleep.

As some of you may recall, when I started this blog in 2013 it was to try and run that course in under 2:00 again. I had NEVER tried any kind of training program until then. Since making that goal, I've focused on marathon training and never focused on another half-marathon. All the halves I've run since then were training runs. Now I want to go all out on a half.

Itsy bitsy little problem though... With all my SAD issues I haven't actually done a training plan. I've just made myself RUN. There are weeks when I think I can make my goal and there are weeks when I think it's hopeless. Two weeks ago I didn't run at all. I was on Spring Break. Last week I made myself run. I gutted through a run club speed session that I probably had no business doing then did my first "long" run in quite some time on Saturday, logging 10 miles. Looking back, the last double digit run I did before that was on 2/22 when I did 13 and decided I wasn't doing a spring marathon this year.

This week has been a good week though. I went to run club again last night and hit my workout goal. Workout was a 2 mile warm up, then 3 to 5 x 1 mile repeats at 10K pace (+/- 10 sec) with 3:30 - 4:00 recovery jogs in between, then a 2 mile cool down. I decided I was going to do 5 one mile repeats and get 10 miles in for the day. Then I was late to practice. G doesn't have dance this week because the company is performing this weekend so I drove directly to Broad Ripple. Traffic was horrible. It took me an hour and a half to get from Greenwood to Broad Ripple! I showed up 20 minutes late so everyone else had already started. Quite frankly, I almost turned around and went back home while I was stuck in downtown traffic as it seemed silly to drive all the way to Broad Ripple to run a workout I knew I'd be running by myself... except that I was afraid I wouldn't do it if I went back home so I continued to drive to commit myself. The good thing about G not having dance though was that I didn't have to be done running at any certain time so I could run as long as I needed.

The other problem I had to figure out was how I was going to track my distance as well as my recovery time on my Garmin. I mean, how do you time your mile then jog for 4:00, then time your next mile? This is the solution I came up with... put the watch in lap time mode. Run one mile, when it beeps jog 3:30 into the next mile. Stop the watch and save that run and reset the watch while continuing to jog - which I figure gets you close to the 4:00 mark. Restart your watch to do the next mile repeat and recovery. I don't know if there's a better way to do this without wearing two watches.

Next question was how fast to do the mile repeats. I averaged 8:10 pace for my last 10K. I am signed up for another 10K later this month where I want to run 8:00 pace...BUT, I also didn't feel like I'd been running enough to do 8:00 mile repeats... What's realistic? I settled on a goal of 8:15.

Here's how the repeats went...

Mile 1 - 8:12.35
Mile 2 - 8:10.35
Mile 3 - 8:10.48
Mile 4 - 8:08.68
Mile 5 - 8:14.34. I hit the stoplight at 75th Street in full stride with 0.15 of a mile left to go and had to decelerate and change direction which stopped all my momentum...

Let me tell ya, it felt GREAT to hit my time for all 5 mile repeats! So glad I went to the session.

In order to run sub-1:50 for a half marathon I have to average 8:23 or better miles. This week I'm thinking I can do it. Now that she knows, Margo is hell bent on us running that time. I know she's put in her training so I'm buckling down these next 3 weeks with mine. Sunlight makes it much better.