Pushing Mileage

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I’m not going to lie, this week I did not run as much as I intended. Seriously, spring is a tricky time of year for me. It seems like I make a plan, and then the plan just gets overtaken with the reality of life. I’m okay with this. In a few weeks school will be out in the craziness of the end of the year will be done. Today, however, we were good kids. I knew I wanted to go for a longer run today. First because I skipped two runs this week but secondly because I feel like it’s really important for me to start pushing my mileage up. I’ve decided that my short runs are now going to be 4 miles or greater, which means that my long runs will be between five and 6 miles from now on. It seems scary in theory, but today as I was running I was all the way up to 4.5 miles and still felt like I could’ve pushed further. That just goes to show me that the more I run and the farther I run the more endurance I’m definitely building. I’m proud that I’m able to recognize that I’m ready to add some distance to my run. It feels really good.

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For a a while I was thinking that my speeds were pretty consistently below 10 minute miles or within the 10 minute mile range. This week I spent some time on Strava going through my running feed and discovered that it was actually pretty rare for me to break below a 10 minute mile last summer, last fall or last spring even. It was good to make that realization as I have been thinking I have been failing as a runner lately. I’ve been feeling slow and so it feels like I backslid. After some reflection time, I realized what was really going on was my fast miles were on really short cardio workouts when I had promised myself that if I went fast I wouldn’t have to go very far,whereas all my slower times are when I’m usually putting some distance under my sneakers. That makes sense- I need to go slower for those endurance runs. That said, I definitely see the value now of time trials, intervals that integrate speed and short, fast runs fairly frequently. I need to time into the Disney Half Marathon, and that has me slightly concerned, but I feel like I’ll get there with lots of regular running and training.
I have decided that I probably will give myself until 2016 before I go to the Disney Half Marathon. That way I don’t have to stress about speed quite as much, quite as quickly. I can take longer and not force it as much, focus on endurance of distance for now. And I believe that I’ll continue to lose weight and the lighter I get the faster I’ll get too.
There’s a run on October 26th fairly close to where I live called the River Run. It’s 13 miles along the Snohomish River, and it seems nice and flat and distractingly beautiful. I’m thinking my birthday gift to myself for my 41st birthday should be this run. I don’t have to register for a while yet, so I can make sure my body can do this thing before I send in my dollars, but I’ll keep you posted. 🙂

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Yes, I realize now that I had something in my teeth, no I didn’t realize it at the time. Just love that I was smiling through the run today, greeting everyone, with a hunk of breakfast in my face. Nice.

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