Weekly workouts: Half marathon training week 1 (11/10-11/16) +postpartum week 21

This week was awesome. No other way to say it. While I'm not up to the longer distances I was running pre-baby, my paces are dropping back to "normal" (and hopefully, normal starts dropping as I continue to improve).

I'm so glad I ran the Run for the Yorktown 5K last weekend because it boosted my confidence that the runner I was before is still in there...somewhere. After I ran that race and wasn't totally spent, I realized that I had faster paces in me for regular old training runs. So this week, I ran a few faster training runs. It really is amazing how much of a mental game running can be.

Tuesday we had our first speedwork session for half marathon training. All we did was a mile warm-up and half mile cool down with a mile in between at a moderately hard pace to get a baseline for improvement over the course of the training cycle. I ran this a little conservatively because I was unsure of how I would do with speedwork at this point (although, I think I'm probably going to be just fine). My Garmin said my mile was 7:51 (the coach with the stopwatch timed me at 8:06 and my Garmin had already signaled a mile a few yards back - I did some lane weaving on the track, apparently), so I guess that's alright, but I think I probably could have gone a little faster than that. But, it leaves lots of room for improvement when we do our recheck at the end of the training cycle.

Thursday I was dragging the entire day, but still wanted to run, so I planned a 3-mile run from my office right after work. When I headed out, I started contemplating cutting it back to 2 miles because I was so tired. I talked myself out of that, and then ended up taking a wrong turn and running an extra mile (so 4 miles total). But on the upside, I had negative splits the entire way of 9:43, 9:31, 9:20, and 9:11, so it was a good run despite how tired I was, and I had pretty scenery in the neighborhoods near my office to keep me entertained. I counted that as my long run for the week since I had to miss Saturday's group run and they were running 4 miles.

Both Friday and Sunday I just did 3-milers and came in at sub-9 minute miles both times. It's definitely feeling good to see those numbers again. It's been since last September that I could consistently run training runs at that pace. I was still running 5Ks at sub-8 minute paces last November, so maybe there's hope for a good run at the Gobble Wobble on Thanksgiving day. Which by the way in case you're like me and were thinking Thanksgiving was still weeks away, it's not. It's next week. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, but I need to get my menu planning on. Thanksgiving is at my house this year and we'll have a house full of people.

So yeah. A good week of running and a rude awakening realizing that the holidays, are in fact, upon us. Merry Hallowthankschrismanewyears, everyone!

The week in workouts

Monday