Neutral Week

Big week for me...my butt and my mileage.  I'm still struggling with eating like a normal, healthy, well balanced person.  This week has been an exercise in healthy eating punctuated with ravenous chocolate and bread (not together, ewww!), binges.  I think as the mileage increases, I need to find a way to increase the calories...even when it looks like A LOT of food in one place. Volume on the plate will (hopefully) keep it out of my pants.

Pace times this week were SLOW, part of that was due to design-- I've been reading more about really training easy during easy and hard during hard...I have trouble wrapping my head around that, I like medium-hard all the time.  It literally breaks my heart to see slow times. 

Did the long run today.  The bad was that the splits were crazy positive and the pace, well, stunk.  I was working REALLY hard at some points, just to keep my pace within 30 seconds of what I thought I should be capable of.  Still, see the great tug of war in my brain about "easy" mileage.  The GOOD, was that I got in a 14 mile run, which is the longest run I've done since late February of last year.  YAY!!!  Kind of makes me think that I might actually have a shot at running a marathon some day.

Weather was nice on the run today, if a bit windy.  It was in the 40's and sunny, so it felt pretty good.  There was still a fair amount of ice in places on the path I use, and I wonder if that doesn't affect my pace.

It was nice, too, that someone stopped at the stoplight when I did to cross the street for the last two miles of my run.  I don't know what the ettiquette is...I said hi and stood there until the light changed.  I took off and she HAMMERED it to pass me.  I thought she was just a far superior runner, but she ended up settling into a pace that pushed me, but didn't drop me.  Hopefully she doesn't think that I'm a jerk, but I just kind of held on about 10 seconds back, usign her to get me home.  There was a huge spike in my pace those last two miles, and I had less of that "I'm going to die now" feeling.

Perhaps I need to find someone to run with.  I don't even need someone to talk (though that would be good too!), I just need that extra mental boost!