Happy Birthday to Shoo and Withdrawal symptoms

Then:

Now:

Happy birthday to my crazy little Halloween baby!!!

On an unrelated front:

I haven’t run in two days and I’m starting to get the shakes.  ;o)  OK, not really, but I can definitely tell I need the endorphin boost.  I spent from 8-5 on Friday and Saturday learning the very basics of coaching.  It was a fabulous class and I learned a ton.  A huge amount of information was thrown at us (the instructor likened it to trying to take a sip from a fire hose), so it’s going to take me a while to absorb and re-read everything I learned.  The hardest part, though, was that the class took up all of my “discretionary” time for those two days and then some.  The kids were on me like white on rice when I got home and then once I got them to bed, I had paid work and volunteer work to complete.  So, such necessary things as running, laundry, and sleeping were relegated to fairly low status.

One of the things I finally understand, now that I’ve taken this class, is the running slow to go fast concept.  She actually explained the physiology behind it and why it’s more important (from an injury avoidance standpoint) to run more miles, but run them slower.  I had a whole lot of “AHA” moments over the last two days.

The biggest “AHA” moment?  I am not in a good place to run another marathon.  I don’t have the time in my life right now to put in enough mileage and still juggle the 5,000 balls I have in the air and still sleep.  Oh, I could finish another marathon.  I’ve already proved I can finish one on lesser mileage and my long run hitting near 50% of my running.  But I saw an overall degredation in speed and was likely tiptoeing just *this* side of getting injured.  So, what does that mean to my training for the forseeable future?  Half marathons, baby!

I noticed in my recent 10 miler that the 25-30 miles per week that I’ve been touching upon allowed me to run that 10 miler almost a minute and a half faster than most of my recent runs.  This, despite only doing speedwork three times since the marathon.  Makes me wonder what I could do at that distance with a base of 30-35 miles per week.  I’ll be taking the plan we created for “Joe”, tweaking it a bit (although I really like the plan we came up with) and being my own guinea pig.  Let’s see what kind of half marathon PR I manage in the spring.