Week 7 of 23 (Catch-Up Edition)

Hello everyone,

It's been a while since I've posted (two weeks in fact). So I'm going to play a little catch up with myself. I've hit some milestones that I wanted to share with you all.

Now, while I haven't been posting, I HAVE been running. I'm sticking pretty well to my program. Last week on Monday I wasn't able to run, but I shifted my days around and was able to run my expected distance/time.

I've been able to consistently run through my training times, so now I've switched gears to work on increasing pace and speed. So my average speed is now what I'm worrying over.

In the last two weeks I've noticed my average speed work it's way up from the mid-high 3's to a consistent 4mph. I'm happy that I'm seeing improvements, but I'm not happy with the speed at all. I'm frustrated by my apparent lack of ability to bump up my pace past four mph(with one noted exception I will talk about in another post). I'm upset because after a work out I don't feel to0 worn out, which would tell me that I didn't work out hard enough, but during the work out I CAN'T move faster. It's as if my muscles just wont listen to me. I've been doing my research however and I am tweaking two things about my workout to help me in that area. These two things are in effect as of this week, so I wont know how they will affect me overall, however I think they will be good for me.

The first thing I'm doing is keeping the spirit of my program (which is time based), but I'm making it more distance based. I'm doing this because since my pace is not improving very well I need to start increasing the overall mileage I run each week (it isn't safe to increase more than 10% per week in mileage, so I'm using that as my goal). The only way to do that is to run a little bit longer per workout or start running on my two rest days. I would prefer not to run on my rest days, so I'm running longer per work out.

The second thing I'm doing to increase my ave speed is to work more on interval training. I've looked at a bunch of suggestions as far as that goes and I'm going to start a program on my interval days (Fridays) where I will be concentrating on building muscle mass to make me a better runner. That means circuit training (or a form of) and short bursts of faster paces. I'm not sure if I should do this twice a week, but I will keep an eye on it and make my final decision in a few weeks.

I'll let you know how that works for me!

The last item of business is very big news for me. Last Saturday I ran a 5K. I will make a special post about that one forthwith.

Keep up the running!