Posts Tagged ‘lunch run’

Back in April, I wrote a post titled “The final disappointment” about missing the Blue Ridge Half Marathon in Roanoke — it was sort of the final thing that I couldn’t do because of my ITB injury.

Today on my lunch run with a few co-workers, we did a point-to-point run from the top of the mountain back to our office. I didn’t talk about today, but doing this run felt more important to me than any of my PRs have this year. I really enjoyed running in the mountains the first half of last year — there’s a huge sense of accomplishment of going both up and down a mountain.

I mean, really … it’s a mountain. It’s not a hill. It’s a mountain. Say what you want about this being the downhill part of the mountain, but 2 miles downhill is brutal. My quads were on fire at the bottom.

The great thing about this was keeping a steady pace in the second half of the run that looks flat, but certainly wasn’t.

I’ll be climbing a mountain again eventually, but I believe that the importance of going downhill is bigger than uphill. Downhill is when the pain started in October, plus it’s really hard on the legs on longer downhills. Plus the Baltimore Marathon has a downhill finish — running down mountains certainly will help prepare for that.

Just like yesterday with two great runs and passing 100 miles for this month, today is yet another milestone in my training journey this summer. Now I need all the pieces to come together to avoid a repeat of this past weekend’s long run.

After finally getting into running in the morning, my new job has twisted my life around. Not that it’s a bad thing. In fact, my new job has a great wellness benefit that actually encourages people to be active. The great thing about it is a couple of people I work closely with are runners, and we have a perfect opportunity to run at lunch.

While I’m not a fan of mid-day running, it hasn’t been all that bad the couple of times I’ve done it. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at how it breaks the work day up and makes it feel like two completely different days. It’ll take a while to get use to, but this will be my routine a few days a week for a while. The payoffs with my benefits are so great and it wouldn’t make sense not to do this.

In other running things going on this week, I have a 10k race on Monday that also has flipped things around for me this week. My long run for the week was yesterday — just 6 miles this week — but I’ll still hit 20 miles for the week. And at the end of next week, I’m running 13.1 miles on Friday and Saturday at various points for Relay for Life. I’d love to do the 13.1 all at once, but I’m just no where near ready for that.

It’s certainly been some crazy busy times for me and lost in all this is that training for the Baltimore Marathon “officially” gets under way in a month. While my injury is in the back of my mind, I’m pretty excited about training again. The lunch runs open up a lot of opportunities to do more doubles and increase my mileage during the week to take pressure off the weekends. I’m not sure of my “plan” yet, and I don’t feel any pressure yet to put anything in writing.