What an amazing day we had here on the West Coast! Gorgeous. The day started off great - Hubs and I have decided that no matter what we're training for (or not training for), we're going to continue our "long runs" and do at least 15K each Saturday and change up the distances every so often to keep us challenged. Last year after our half we got totally lazy and barely ran during Nov/Dec, so when we started up in Jan, it was sooooooo painful. Plus packing on the usual Xmas flab didn't help much. Our minimum distance before was 10K, but we're hoping to challenge ourselves so we're upping the ante. We decided to do a 15K recovery run today - my legs aren't sore at all and feel strong so I'm thrilled as it must mean my legs are stronger than the same time last year. Yay!
Man...what a fabulous run. Crisp, cool, and clear...we headed out on a local trail and just ran. And for the first time in months and months, I ran for the love of it and not because I was training for something. It didn't feel like a chore - I wasn't constantly ruminating in my head about what my race plan was, what my distance was next week, how my foot was doing, was that my knee twinging? I just looked off into the distance, cleared my head, put one foot in front of the other and remembered why I love to run.
The other benefit of the race - I've snapped out of my snail's pace and for most of this run was running around 5:45 pace...much, much faster than I was previously and it felt great. Strange how quickly the body adapts - anything around that pace when I was in the depths of marathon training was painful. This lead me to think - if one hard race could do that, what could consistent speedwork do? Once my 10 pound challenge is done, I'm going to start introducing a little bit of speedwork - I'm gonna break the 2 hour half next year!
No comments:
Post a Comment