3 miles strong

OK. Let me start by saying I did NOT want to run today, at all. I woke up in a bad mood, my throat is a little sore, and I'm just tired. I wanted to spend all day in bed. But my husband needed to get out to test the bike he might be buying from a co-worker, and I knew that I didn't have a single good excuse, so out I went.

My goal over the past couple of weeks has been to get strong enough to run a solid 3 miles outside, with hills and such, without needing a walking break. Today, I managed to pull that off.

My pacing was pretty good, too. There were a couple of rough hills along the way and my heart rate got a little higher than I'd like it to be, but I recovered just fine. My 5k time was 32:51, right around a 10:30 pace. I'm very happy with 10:30.

I also played around with my stride. I had a mini-coaching session with my personal trainer on Thursday, thanks to my team training members calling out, and he introduced me to the concept of pose running. Pose running is essentially running on the balls of the feet (plus a lot more than that, but that's the most simple definition!). It was obviously a very brief introduction, and I quickly realized that it was not something I could personally maintain for more than short distances without a lot more training, but for whatever reason, it seemed to make hills a lot easier to climb. So I started changing up my stride when I was climbing, and it worked! It's probably not the "right" thing to do but so long as I'm not injuring myself and I'm still moving, that's all I really care about.

This coming week is going to be tough to fit my runs in, thanks to several Team In Training meetings and webinars, but I feel better knowing I've already met my preliminary pre-training goal. The Race for the Cure is just under 2 weeks away, so now I just need to keep reinforcing that distance so it's even easier.