My Great Running Week!

Things have been great since I finished the Crim 10 miler last Saturday.  I ran 7 miles the morning after the race as recommended by my running coach.  I had 16 on the schedule for last Saturday but only ran 10 in the race.  We decided I should run 6-8 miles on Sunday so I headed out first thing in the morning.  

The first 4 miles felt great and then I started getting really bored.  This is when I realized I haven't run more than 4 miles on my own in over 10 weeks.  Every long run has been with a group of friends and the other runs have still been with friends.  I only regularly run my 3 recovery miles on Sunday by myself.  

After 4 miles, I pushed myself through the boredom and heat to 7 miles.  At that point, I was all done.  Mentally I had finished a long time ago, so I was happy with 7.  Physically, I was a full minute per mile slower than I had run the Crim the day before, but I had no pain.  Just a bit tired.  

Tuesday night we met for our group run and I felt like garbage.  The good news is that just about everyone that ran the Crim felt sluggish and we just trucked along slowly.  I'm glad that I didn't feel this bad on Sunday, but that's fine.  We got through a little over 4 miles and called it a day.

I postponed my Thursday miles in order to run my long run of 12 miles this morning.  Three of us from our running group had weekend plans and wouldn't be able to run with the group on Saturday morning, so after Tuesday's run, we decided to meet Friday morning for our long run of 12 miles.

It was way darker than I thought it would be at 6:30 this morning, but we headed out on time.  We did a 2 miler to a park with a water stop then 2 more miles through a really pretty part of Ann Arbor to another park with water :)

At this point, we were all feeling pretty good and did a 4 mile loop around this nature center and back to this water stop.  With 8 miles under our belt, we were feeling pretty good and headed back to the first park and then on to our cars. 

Miles 10.5-12 were pretty much brutal.  It was HOT, we were tired and just ready to be done.  This is the point when we were all so glad we were running together, since on our own we would have stopped for sure.  

I'm just glad that my 12 is over and I get to sleep in this Saturday morning!  I'll run 3 recovery miles tomorrow and my 5 miles from Thursday on Sunday.  It will work perfectly.

Up next... 18 miles this week!  Holy Moly!  It's finally here :)