Addiction, and another half-baked week of running

Hi, my name is 'lina, and I'm addicted to training plans.

After a rigorous commitments to doing what my schedule told me to every day from January until October 9, you'd think I'd be grateful to have a little freedom. While I appreciate no longer having to be up and out the door in the 4-4:30am range, or running for 3+ hours on Saturdays, I feel really lost without my trusty Type-A plan of what to do each day and a real goal in the future to work towards. 

I have three "races" in the foreseeable future: 

1) a charity 5K on 11/20 that I signed up for because a group of the 20-something chorus girls are doing it

2) the Thanksgiving Half (tradition)

3) the Locomotive Half on 12/11 (originally thought an out of state friend might be doing it, heard good recs from Brandi + others, and kind of want a more PR-friendly half course to "use" my Chicago training on)

That's three races within 30 days, for anyone who can't math. Since you can't race that much effectively, I've decided to make Locomotive my goal race, treat Thanksgiving as a tune-up, and use the 5K for speedwork/funsies (with a goal of sub-25).

This means I should start some sort of focused training plan for Locomotive. Yet, when I took the Thanksgiving ATC plan, applied it to Locomotive's goal date, and backed out where I should be this week, I realized I didn't feel like getting up at 4:15am to do an 8ONB on Tuesday... nor did I want to go back to the track where we almost got attacked by a hellhound for SpeedworkThursday if it's only Brandi and me. Oh, and I felt like absolute death from about 3pm on Friday until 8pm Saturday. 

...so, another week gone, I suppose. 

Monday

4 @ 9:30/mi

ABC run today (Angelina, Brandi, and Courtney). Enjoyed the run, but it still felt a bit hard/too fast on occasion, so I pulled back from B&C's "comfortable pace" at times.

Tuesday

10KTuesday @ 9:19/mi

Intended to do an ONB, but didn't really make any conscious pace decisions in-run. Ended up with a really consistent, fast run after a one mile warm-up. Clocked near 9-flats for most of it, and didn't feel like it was too hard; I was "just keeping up with everyone else for conversation". 

Wazzup, 9-min miles

Wednesday

rest

This worked out well in my schedule, since I had some food poisoning symptoms... :P 

Thursday

strength and cross-training
15min strength training with freeweights-- I really need a routine or something to motivate me on this.... Like, really.

Brandi and I had tossed around the idea of joining CrossFit together, since there are some locations with 5:00am classes between our homes, but then we looked at the price. Eek! $100/mo? No thanks. 

Friday

easy 4.1 @ 9:36/mi
Not much to say about this one. Good run :)

Saturday

11 with ATC 
Nothing
And, by "nothing", I literally mean nothing. I got a grand total of 978 steps in thanks to a debilitating tension headache that made even turning my head in bed almost unbearable. 

Sunday

3.56mi stroller run @ 10:13/mi avg
PLUS 2.05mi @ 8:29/mi avg
Today's Running Mamas meetup was exactly what I needed. Birgit, Shelly, and I enjoyed a little under four easy, progression miles with our babies. I had a bit of a headache lingering for the first half mile and some residual back tension, but I still felt the best I'd felt all weekend while I was running. 

Running is so much of a stress-reliever for me that I decided to go for a second run solo this afternoon. I haven't run by myself in... I don't even know. It was beautiful. No pace expectations, no conversation, absolutely nothing but me, myself, and I. I ended up being a lot faster than I thought, too.