I'm not sure how it happened, but another week flew right on by. Work continues to consume the bulk of my time, leaving me with very little time to do my personal side stuff (blogging, design, jewelry, art, etc.). But at least I really like what I do for a living!

And I'm still in bad news, good news mode.

Bad news: I'm still coughing and it's aggravated my asthma to the point where I've needed to use my nebulizer. However, it doesn't seem to be making my asthma worse when I run, which is awesome. It's mostly the cough rather than wheezing that's my main issue right now and I'm pretty sure it's allergies at this point rather than sickness.

This is a new way for allergies to show up for me since my sinuses were typically swollen, which caused them to get clogged and infected. Now everything is normal, but the junk is running back my throat, causing a cough. Fun. Hopefully by the fall allergy season, my allergy shots will be doing an even better job and I won't deal with this again.  

Good news: I still don't have a sinus infection and that's a huge, huge deal. And I didn't have to get prednisone to get rid of inflammation and wheezing. Also a huge, huge deal. So while it's not awesome that I got sick and it hung around for so long in the form of a nasty cough , the fact that I didn't need antibiotics for an infection and prednisone for asthma is pretty damn awesome. 

I'm really hoping this blog soon turns back into tracking my progress of getting faster and stronger rather than documenting ongoing illness and getting slower. It's been two years now. I'm ready. 

Workout summary

• Monday: Off
• Tuesday:  Run/walk (horrible cough, felt awful) - 3 miles
• Wednesday: Off
• Thursday: Easy run - 4.06 miles (9:07 pace, still coughing)
• Friday: Barre
• Saturday:
  • Easy run - 2.89 miles (8:46 pace)
  • Bike ride - 9 miles
• Sunday:
  • Easy run - 6.01 miles (9:03 pace)
  • 3 mile bike ride
• Easy run

Yoga/barre: 1
Runs: 4
Bike: 2
Total miles:  15.96 miles
Total workouts: 7

Even though I felt exhausted and couldn't stop coughing, I ran 4 times this week. My first run on Tuesday was miserable and ended up being a run/walk. I was just so tired. The second one was okay, but I still had to stop to walk a few times because of tiredness and coughing. The third one was great! I ran with a friend and we were chatting away the entire time. It was an easy pace and it ended up at sub-9. This gives me hope. 

By Sunday (and my fourth run), I was feeling much better. I had 6 miles on the schedule, which was my longest run since the Kiawah Half in December. My only goal was to finish, no matter how glacial the pace. I started slow, managed a negative split run and even had enough left in the tank to run the last half mile at a 7:30 pace (just to see if I could). All of this in 100% humidity. So already I think I'm seeing improvements.

My husband came along for this run and rode his bike and pulled B in the trailer, and it was nice to have the whole family out on a ride-run.  

In order to focus on running this week, I cut back on other workouts and only did one barre class. This isn't exactly ideal, but I want to rebuild my running base and the only way to do that is...run. Shocking, right? 

I plan to get back to multiple barre and yoga classes (plus adding at least one good HIIT workout in there), but only after I'm completely done with this illness/allergy/coughing crap and I feel like I'm in a good place with running consistency. For the past several months, I've bagged running in favor of other workouts, which is fine especially since I was dealing with iron deficiencies and recovering, but it's not making me a better or faster runner. So now it's time to focus. 

And that's a wrap on this week. Looking forward to what next week brings!

How as your week?

I'm linking up with HoHoRuns and MissSippi Piddlin'  for their Weekly Wrap post.