Week In Review

It has been a good week! I feel like something has ‘clicked’ and I have this everything-is-falling-into-place feeling.

My adjusted training plan is exactly what I needed. I have run three days in a row this week, nice and easy, and I feel great! I’m happy to have a rest day today, and cross training tomorrow, and looking forward to a 4 mile run on Sunday. Even though I have added a day of running, I still feel like I’m getting a small break before I start to increase the long runs again. Sometimes you have to take a step back, to move forward. Switching to shorter runs, more frequently keeps my overall mileage the same, but I feel like I’m getting more practice and better quality miles under my feet. Yes, this is much better!

Yesterday I had a 3 mile run at the rec. I ended up with a pretty good run, although I had to cut it a just short of a full 3 miles because it was busy and people were waiting for machines. (30 minute time limit which I was blatantly exceeding!) Oh and also despite the ‘grunting’ guy on the ‘mill next to me, who would spew a huge grunt/exhale every 5 steps or so. What is THAT?

I have started using LogYourRun.com and I really like it! It is a great site to track data, and not just for running. You can log swims, cycling, cross training, strength training etc. I also like how the local weather auto-populates for each day that you enter data. Kind of cool!

My favorite feature is that I can also view graphs and charts to get a visual of what I have done over the past few weeks. Last night I checked out a graph of my runs over the last 10 weeks and I thought, hmmmm…now why are those four bars bright red like that?

The answer is at the bottom there if you can make it out.....

WOW. Ok, thanks for THAT – but what I love about that is, those 3 weeks in RED correlate with my gradual ‘stress’ that had been building from the original Runners World plan I was doing! Those weeks are where I had more ‘bad’ runs than good, when I did not look forward to my runs, I felt like I was not progressing, and on and on. This is how a new runner learns to LISTEN TO YOUR BODY. Don’t ignore the warning signals, physical OR mental.

My pace chart indicates a pretty substantial improvement from even last week to this week – so that was fun to see visually as well.

I highly recommend the site! I know there are many out there, but this is the first one that I have found that is geared for more than just running.

And finally, MizFit recently reviewed the book ‘The New Rules For Lifting For Women’. One of my new goals is to build some lean muscle to be a better runner. So her review of this book came at a perfect time for me. I picked this book up yesterday, and I have not been able to put it down! It is written exactly to someone like me….in a no – nonsense, get real, these are the facts sort of tone. Here’s what you need to do, just do it. No lofty promises of ‘you TOO, can look like THIS’….I feel like a trainer is right there speaking to me directly. I am still in the beginning of the book, and I’m happy to share more as I go along, but at the moment….I highly recommend it. There is also a ‘Rules for Men’ version and if it is written as well as the women’s book, I’d say it’s probably a worthy read for the guys!

So, it has been a great week overall. The scale progress is looking promising too!

Have a great weekend!