It's been a while since I updated. August was a mixed up month. A holiday affected a couple of weeks, however I did sneak some basic gear into my bag along side the camping gear crammed into the car. I did a couple of short runs along the beach which were lovely. Barefoot shoes are great against the sand. My watch has tracking functions and although I was under schedule for the HM training plan, I was generally active. I also slept better than usual!
I'm currently settling into new routines. A new run in my life is the school run. If I was genuinely running it, it would be two or three minutes away, however this is at 4 year old pace... An old routine that I'm returning to is my circuits class. Ouch, how I hurt after the first session. It was 4 days before I stopped hurting! However when being timed during the "300" (100 press ups, squats and mountain climbers broken into your choice of reps), I actually did it in good time, astonishing myself by beating some of the hard core regulars!
So the actual running... there's been a lack of some of the additional shorter paced runs, but between cross training and long runs I'm doing well. I've been building up to 1:45 hr runs for the first time in a year and they're going really well. When I was at this stage last year I could either run or walk and burned out easily, so a lot of my long runs featured a significant portion of walking. This time I'm finding that I can slow and relax the pace and keep it more sustainable. There's a few factors at play here, having a mellow long slow run play list, a watch that shows my current pace (compared to last year just getting the pace at the end of a mile from my phone) and probably more influential, having worked on my speed and different paces since my HM last year. I'm actually really enjoying these runs and I'm not feeling burned out like I did before. Even last week when I was recovering from the circuits class, I managed to run much more than I expected.
So next stage... build up to a couple of 2hr runs, and actually do some of those shorter faster runs!
