Catching up with HM training (w. HTC ghosting)

I was a bit down after last Wednesday's run. It really seems like I'm going backwards lately. Struggling to get run for more than 15 minutes at a time when I worked up to 4 miles. By Friday morning I had decided to go all out again. Not really a smart plan in retrospec.

 HTC

My Ghosting schedule was a 5.64 mile job at 10:30 am and 4.11 mile at 8:34 pm. Originally I had planned to do the morning run inside on the treadmill and the later outside, because of the distances and the heat. Well, not sure what got into me but I decided to outside for the first leg. BIG MISTAKE! I chose a route that I thought would be about half shaded. WRONGO! I think I ended up runnning only 1 mile. I only got in 2.44 in 35 minutes. You can see from the route pics below that I seemed to be lost! I was looking for shade. Needless to say, I called it quits early and went home feeling all yucky again.

But come 8 pm, I had decided to go back out and try it again, OUTSIDE. I had hoped to run the full distance but did not make that goal. I did run for a full 30 minutes which was the assigned time for the day for my half class so that was good. I did also do the full distance.

Leg 1

Leg 13

All in all it was a fun experience. I was following 2 groups of teams. The spark teams were on facebook and the Nuun teams on Twitter. I paid more attention to the spark team since I was kinda participating. The nuun team will blog later and that will be easier to follow. It just made the desire to do a relay that much stronger. Gotta find a team now!!!

Saturday's group run was a 40 minute run. I was determined to do better and slowed my pace as advised. Technically I did well. I ran what I thought was the route (forgot to actually study the map before hand) and ended up doing 2.43m in 26:50 @ 11:03 average pace. Not as slow as I had planned but ran the whole thing. Only to find out we messed up the route big time. One of the coaches took a couple of us back out to make sure we got in enough miles. We did 1.13m in 12:54 @ 11:27 avg pace. Roughly translated into me getting in my full 40 min run! Yay go me.

Monday's run was not so good again. Schedule 30 minute run, I managed 25 and walked the last 5. I have come to the conclusion that I hate running laps no matter how big the lap is. I have decided to no longer run any of my routes by the house. I'll blog about that later.

I have also decided to get more cross-training in, so I went for a 30 minute walk Tuesday morning. I'm hoping to get more miles in on my bike for this since I do want to do a duathlon later this year.

Wednesday run was another 30 minute group run. I just made it: 2.72m in 32 @ 11:47ap. I was actually quite excited. It was about 93F outside and there was lots of sun beating down on me. I hate running in the early evening.

I think learning how to slow my pace and control it is really paying off. After all, completing the half running the whole time is my actual goal. I can worry about my speed later on.