A Song of Ice And Snow And Wind And Blizzards (Victory Half Week 5 of 8)

Week 5 started off great but kind of fell apart at the weekend. A friend of ours was renting a house in Tahoe & invited us to come up and stay with her, and given the epic snow conditions lately, we decided to take her up on it.

It's such a fine line between "Sounds awesome but I can't, I'm prioritizing training right now" and "Life is short and you're not a pro athlete, don't let training turn you into a monk." I have really been trying to prioritize getting in pretty-ok-to-decent shape for Victory Half but I also really like to ski and with everything else I have going on nearly every weekend between now and May, I wasn't going to have a lot of chances.

So, like any other respectable modern woman, I decided that choosing was a false dichotomy and with enough effort and hustle, I could "have it all."

If you've ever tried to "have it all," you can probably guess where this is going.

Boston Marathon Week 11 of 18: How Not to Plan Your Training Week

So, at least for now, it seems like I've gotten back to a normal training load, just in time to turn 37 last Friday. I decided against the Saturday 10K, for a lot of reasons, including 1) running 6+ miles at 10K race pace is REALLY DIFFERENT than a run-of-the-mill speed or tempo workout, and I don't want to risk my hip relapsing so soon after it's started to feel normal again; 2) I reallllly need to prioritize long runs right now given my distinct lack of them as of late, and racing on Saturday makes a Sunday long run potentially miserable or a bad idea or both (if not impossible); 3) $60 is pretty pricey for a 10K I haven't even really been training for; but mostly 4) I wanted to go out for a fun dinner on my birthday Friday night without having to worry about what I'm eating or drinking and going to bed early and getting up at the butt crack of dawn or feeling like crap at the starting line.

So. I'll race something else later. Right now we are seven weeks out from Boston and it seems prudent to keep one's eye on the prize so to speak.

As for week 11? Well, on the face of things, it looks like, "Hey, wow, a normal-looking marathon training load! Woohoo!" And there's some truth there. My hip has felt 100% completely fine (because you can bet your booty I wouldn't be running this mileage otherwise), and it DOES feel super good to complete all the workouts and finish the full long run and even hit all the paces. (I've even been doing the strength work!) So, in a lot of ways, #winning.

But there was also a little comedy of errors going on this week in terms of how I ended up running all those miles & workouts. So let us talk about how, in an ideal world, one would perhaps NOT structure their training week!

Boston Marathon Week 6 of 18: Winter Running: Take 2

Friends, we are officially a third of a way through this training cycle and I'm not exactly sure how that happened.

There's something about hitting 50 miles a week for the first time in a training cycle that makes it start to feel real. All through training for RNR San Jose and even through November and December running in the low to mid 40s felt physically terrible, as if I were training much much harder than I actually was, and it was hard to imagine getting back into that 50-60 mpw marathon training zone. Thankfully in the past few weeks something seems to have shifted and longer, harder workouts are finally--FINALLY!--starting to feel good again.

{proceeds to cross alllll the phalanges & knock on alllll the wood...}

~*~*~ Boston Marathon: Week 6 of 18 ~*~*~