Week 1 recap

Huzzah — week 1 is in the books and I did not mess up anything. With only four runs, I didn’t have many excuses.

Tuesday I ran trails at Tom Sawyer Park — it was hot so I wanted to be in the shade, plus I knew I’d run slower off-road. And I had recycling to drop off. It was a nice run, saw two baby deer and almost stepped on a rabbit. I did my 10×100 striders on a paved section in the back of the park.

Thursday I ran with the hubs, who was going long. Warm but not very humid, so tolerable. Chris was going pretty easy, and I ended up picking it up by myself over the last three miles. Safe to say those are my longest weekday runs in quite a while.

I thought about moving Saturday’s easy 5 to Friday, but none of my plans to run with friends panned out, so I didn’t. Instead, I slept in Saturday, ran from home and ended at Starbucks. Walked home with my latte.

Sunday was a bit of a crazy run. The plan called for 13 miles with 8 miles at goal marathon pace, which felt like an intimidating volume of faster-paced work. I bargained with myself that I would do sets of two miles with a half-mile easy between.

As I was putting in the first few warmup miles, I kept thinking about how it looked like it was going to rain — even though I had checked the weather and there was nothing forecasted for about 3 hours.

Wrong.

Now, if it had been a drizzle, I wouldn’t have complained, because it was stupid-humid. It came down lightly for about 15 seconds, then went into full-on pelting, stinging, can’t-see-where-you’re-going rain. I dropped some way-too-fast miles en route back to the gym.

• Step 1: check radar. Not good.
• Step 2: grab various dry things from the car, head inside.
• Step 3: put wet clothes into swimsuit spinner.
• Step 4: put spun-out nasty clothes back on.
• Step 5: Dry socks, wet shoes.
• Step 6: Treadmill for 3 miles (hey, Say Yes To The Dress, my constant treadmill companion!)
• Step 7: Back outside for 2.5 miles.

Maybe one of the stranger things I’ve done. But I got all the miles in without being absolutely miserable. I did get in all 8 of the GMP miles, although I definitely don’t have the pace drilled down. I averaged just under GMP, but that’s because I bolted when it started pouring which offset some that were a tad slow. But not a bad first go at it.

Four runs again this week. I could get used to this, but I shouldn’t, because it’s back to five runs the week after. Chris and I are both officially registered for the race! Oh, and today is our wedding anniversary. Our first. Yay!