Saturday, October 29, 2011

Hello Again, Avenues My Friends (8 miles)

Today I ran 8 miles.

It felt so good!

Most of it was up The Avenues which is one of my favorite places to go, but I haven't done it for a long time.

I had just dropped the Jeep off to get the breaks checked (they were making a terrible grinding noise!) so I just ran from there. I really liked doing that. It made me feel so flexible and adventurous - even though it was only a mile from my house. :)

Starting out I was a little cold, and my calf was still feeling pretty stiff from the hard track workout I did Thursday morning at the gym, but it warmed up after a few miles. It was kind of hard running up those hills too, but I really just felt so happy to be running and to be able to do that at all - even though it wasn't super fast. I did let myself run pretty fast on the downhills, though. That's so fun!

When I got closer to home, I was trying to decide if I should just go home or check in on the Jeep. Then I saw that a train was going across the street I'd take to go home. No problem. I just went down a few more blocks to the street that goes over the tracks and got to do one more "hill." This was also the street where the Jeep was so I just stopped in to see how much longer it had. He said it would be about 45 minutes so I just decided to run home and figure out how to pick it up later. Doing that extra mile made my run a little more than 8 miles (maybe 8.2? I don't know for sure because it was a cloudy day and it took the Garmin forever to locate the satellite). I had planned on doing closer to 7, but I felt good so it was fine.

I felt really good for the whole run, other than my knee hurting a little at a few points. I realized after I got home that I ran for 1:28 without any fuel or even water. And I felt fine. If I knew I was going to be out there for an hour and a half, I would have probably brought something, but it ended up being just fine. It was actually really nice to just run and not worry about anything like that! It probably helped that I had a peanut butter and banana toast right before I left, and that it was a cool day.

I've been doing pretty good with running 4 times a week. Tuesday at running group, I didn't do any extra so I just did 2.29 miles. I usually want to do 4-5 miles on that day so I'll make sure to do that next time. It's always just so fun to hang out with everyone afterwards, it's hard to just run away. I've really loved my running group! Making some new friends and having more of a social life (if you could call it that, but it was pretty much non-exsistent before this) has been really, really good for me! I've just felt so happy lately, so thank you to all you girls who humor me and come run on Tuesdays! :)

Other than the running, I haven't been doing great. I know I need to do cross training to avoid injury and I really want to do other things, but it just keeps not working out and I have nothing (read: no race) compelling me to do it. I'm trying not to worry about it too much, though, and just enjoy my off-season. I am so excited about snowboarding, I can hardly stand it! And I also want to get back into climbing so we'll see what I can start fitting in.

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