Week 4 review.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
                                                                                         Maya Angelou

I realized this morning that I love and hate Monday's all at once. Work-wise, I HATE Mondays. I work all week to whittle my to-do list down and then I get here on Monday morning and have to write up a new list and fill it with a whole new week's worth of stuff. DEPRESSING.

But training wise. I love Mondays. I can look back over my last weeks worth of training and be happy/proud with the final outcome. Sure, you can bet that a lot of those runs sucked ass. But, I got them done and logged. And with starting a new week of training, there is excitement there. Is this week going to be a good week? Am I going to feel awesome? Is this the week that I start to get some confidence in my running? SO MANY EXCITING VARIABLES!

So, since this isn't supposed to be a post about the upcoming week, but the past week, I need to STFU and get this recap really going.

Overall, last week was GREAT. Most of my runs felt really good. I think I've finally gotten myself into the training mode and things just clicked really well.

One issue, I've been having some problems getting my ass out of bed in the morning (which means I get to work a bit later than I'd like), but I think I've pinpointed the problem (it came to me while I laid in bed, bailing on my morning recovery run)... I've been kinda lax about taking my vitamins lately. WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR ME TO REMEMBER TO CONSISTENTLY TAKE VITAMINS? Jeebus. So, I'm going to be a little more diligent this week with my B-complex, B-12, and Iron pills. I think that will help.

The meat of week 4:
The fast(ish)- 7 miles total 4 miles at 8:45ish.
The long(ish)- 13-14 miles.
The total- 50ish.
The wildcard: a 5K where my expectations were (of course) set wayyyyy too fucking high.

For this week's "tempo" run, I dragged the KoB over to the track with me and we ran my 4 miles there. I thought it was going to be tedious and mind-numbingly boring. But, it was actually fantastic. I felt really good. The pace was a little aggressive, but it felt manageable. It was awesome. I think we ended up averaging around 8:40 for those miles. SUCCESS.

For my long run, I met up with my friend Liz on Sunday to run 13-14 miles. She was running 22, so I didn't feel bad about keeping her on the slower side with my pace. Except... we actually didn't run all that slow. I ended up with 14.5 at an honest pace and am thankful for running friends like Liz who push me out of my comfort zone a little, pace-wise. Plus, I can think of no better way to catch up with friends than running a couple of hours with them.

The wildcard.... ugh, for some GODFORSAKEN reason I've been itching to "race." I've been trying to find a 5k to run and decided that this weekend was it. I spent all of Friday psyching myself up for a PR attempt the next day.

Spoiler alert: It didn't happen.

More on that debacle later this week. 

Overall, even a shitty race attempt and a rough long run can't ruin the week. Week 4 was a good week.