Nearly 13 weeks completed

I have now been in training for nearly 13 full weeks. Hard to believe it's already been three months!

My finish picture from
Davis Moo-nlight 10K
Facchino Photography

The time has flown by. I haven't had much to report or say, so I haven't been posting here much. How many times can you say "I went running today" and have it be interesting?

Yesterday went out for a short run (which is now four miles--a distance I was concerned about when I first started) and for the first time I broke the 12:00/mile pace. In fact, we've been regularly running around 12:30 on the short runs, which is a fairly recent accomplishment and I was very happy about this--but beating that by :44? Wholly cow! I was listening to my favorite workout music on Pandora (Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Rage Against The Machine, etc.) and I just felt motivated to go fast...and I didn't seem to get too tired, so I just kept it up. Runkeeper's GPS jumped around a bit and told me I went 3.98 miles, but then I checked mapmyrun.com and discovered it was only 3.76, so if you saw my facebook post that said 11:07, blast it was actually 11:46. But damn...still very fast for me! It felt good to be able to run like that.

Tomorrow I run 13 miles, and we usually end up going an extra tenth or two, so it's basically a half marathon although not official. Pretty exciting. When I look back at my earlier posts and being nervous each week about going 4, then 5, etc., and now I know I can do 13 because I did 12 last week and 10 the week before that...that's pretty cool. I do worry that I'm going to reach a point where my body just says it can't do anymore, but so far it's been a trooper. Knees feel fine, I'm not overly sore the next day, etc., although of course I'm pretty tired after a long run. Knock on wood!

Monday I'm running a 5K in the Labor Day Races in Davis. It's part of A Change Of Pace's Tour de Fit, for which I'll get an extra medal after I do three of the designated races. This is one of my short runs for the week, and since it's only 3.1 miles I plan to push my speed as much as running conditions allow. There's only so much under my control so I can't get too obsessed about it, but I want to see how fast I can get it done. I have several races lined up for this fall and I'm looking forward to doing them (and getting the t-shirts and medals, ha!)

I far surpassed my goal of 100 miles for the summer as part of that challenge--153 as of yesterday. I'm going to continue tracking it to see how many I end up running by the time the marathon gets here. I don't think I'd run 153 miles in my whole life to this point, let alone in three months! Woot!