I'm Serious This Time. Haha

Hi. Yes, I fell off the running bandwagon again. Sort of. I’ve still been running, occasionally, but work and school have been pretty much ruling my life. Thankfully, I’ve been “hired in” at my part-time job (I was technically working for a temp company August – mid January), which means I’ll have a steady schedule I can schedule my life around. And have health insurance and days off. Yay. Plus I added a new skill to my resume – forklift driving. Oh yea, I can load freight in the semi trailers now. It’s kind of awesome. Haha.

Quickly, I just want to touch on my fitness goals for the next couple months …

1. My 2^nd half marathon (The Glass City/ Owens Corning Half) is April 28^th. That’s less than 3 months away. And there are quite a few people I know (including my ex) who are also running it. I have a training schedule written out (and adjusted once already) that is similar to the once I used for the Boy Scout Half last year. It worked well then, so I wanted to stick to something I was comfortable with (for now). In a nutshell, my week looks like:

Cross-Training/ Rest/ 3 miles (trails, mostly)/ 4-6 miles (progressive)/ 3 miles (sustained speed – mainly Thursday night group run)/ Rest/ Long Run

2. Be able to hold a (modified – forearms and toes) plank for 5 minutes by the end of the year. I’m doing this progressively, obviously. I plank at least once a day and each week I add 5 seconds to my “goal time.” If I’m able to hold it longer than my “goal time” for the week, I do. This week is 1 minute 5 seconds.

3. Tone up my arms and upper body. I’ve been “researching” on Pinterest and have a couple circuits I want to start doing consistently. I spent close to an hour Saturday night printing them all off and organizing and evaluating them.

So … These are all attainable, right? I tried to keep my goals simple to make it more likely I’d stick to them. I want to update here at least once a week to just keep up to date on my progress and remind myself how far I've come.

Group run this past Thursday was kind of my “coming back to running” kick in the pants. It was bitterly cold and windy, but I was excited to get back to group and see my “friends”. Now that I have Thursdays off work, I have no excuse to NOT go. And running with all the faster people challenges me and pushes me to run faster. Hehe. Since I hadn’t run in a while and it was SO windy, I decided I was just going to be happy if I ran the whole 3 miles with an average pace of 11:00/ mile. When I finished and looked down at my Garmin, I was in shock. 3 miles in 0:30:39.  That’s an average pace of 10:12/ mile. The first 2 miles (with a headwind) were around 10:30 and the third was 9:36. Holy cow. I’m not quite sure if my legs just remembered what speed feels like or I was so cold that my body didn’t realize how hard I was pushing. Haha.

My long(er) run yesterday almost got sabotaged by the snow. I love running in snow, I really do, but I saw the condition the roads were in when I drove over to feed my friends’ cat (they’re out of town for the weekend) and I was actually scared to run on the roads. The municipalities really hadn’t anticipated that much snow and the snow plows were slow to react. My “saving grace” (as mom put it) was the “dreadmill”. 7 miles in our basement with just my iPod, staring at the wall. Oh, and did I mention the hot air vent directly above me blowing (what felt like) 80* air on me. Yea, it was miserable. But I got it done. And I was proud of myself afterwards. Every couple minutes I was mentally calculating how early I could quit without feeling like a failure and then a rocking song would come up on my playlist and I’d be rejuvenated. As usual, my pace on the treadmill is slower than what I normally run (still can’t figure that one out), but the mileage got done.

Alright, I’m off to get ready for work. We moved up our shift time for this evening to accommodate those who want to be home in time to watch the Super Bowl. As much as I love football, if I get the chance to stay later and get some more time on this paycheck, I’m going to take it.