Weekly Recap - Kiawah Half Marathon Training Week 9 (11/6-11/12)

BACK TO REALITY and an update in plans

We were still on vacation Monday and Tuesday, which knocked my schedule off a bit, and I struggled to get back into the swing of things when we got back. But still, an okay week with some really fantastic (i.e., frigid (for Charleston) weather!) and a bit of an adjustment in plans based on recent health stuff and training.

I also ran my first race in almost a year where I wasn't pacing someone else or run/walking. It did not go well, thanks to the antibiotics I'm on for a longer dose (because the UTI was treated improperly for so long and it made it aggressive). They make me tired, weak, and achey. You can read the full recap post here.

I've also decided to adjust some of my Kiawah goals and training, and added a new race to my calendar. More on that in a bit, but first here's what my week looked like:

Workout summary

  
   Monday
   Vacation - Magic Kingdom
  
   Tuesday
    Off/travel day 
  
   Wednesday
   Off/trying to catch up on work stuffs
  
   Thursday
    Easy run - 5 miles at a glacial pace 
  
   Friday
   Off
  
Saturday
    Summerville Sweet Tea 10K 
  
   Sunday
   Easy run - 5 miles at 9:04 pace
  
   Totals
    3 runs / 16.2 miles

Monday

Vacation - Magic Kingdom
My workout for the day was wrangling a somewhat cranky toddler all over the Magic Kingdom. 'Nuff said. Full race and vacation recap coming soon.

Tuesday

Travel day
After all of the walking and being stuffed in a car, my back was really bothering me. Thank goodness for Stretch Zone and chiropractor appointments immediately following vacation.

Wednesday

Work nuttery - back to real life
No workout this day, either. I wanted to go to BodyFlow but had so much work to catch up on that it just wasn't going happen.

Thursday

Run! Finally.
I finally started to get things back to normal and out of vacation mode on Thursday with an easy run. I wasn't feeling great and I ran 5 miles at barely a 10:30 pace, which is extremely out of the ordinary for me. My legs were tired, tight, and heavy - a combined result of vacation hangover and meds. The weather was also pretty icky. It was raining and cold (50s), but still humid (90s), which irritated my asthma.

Friday

Nothing
I just wasn't feeling great on Friday and knowing I had a race the next day, I skipped all workouts.

Saturday

Summerville Sweet Tea 10K
Not awesome at all. I won't rehash what I already said in the recap, but suffice to say this was not the race I was hoping for. I wasn't planning or hoping to PR, but I was hoping to run well for a slightly faster training run (51-52 minutes). That's not what happened at all. I was just too tired and weak.

Sunday

Easy run - 5 miles
I was supposed to run 12 miles, but based on how I was feeling, I wasn't so sure that was going to happen. And it didn't. I got in 5 easy miles and called it a day.

On a bright note, the weather here with the exception of Thursday, has been fantastic with lows in the 40s and highs in the 60s, and it's supposed to stay that way for a while. I don't think we had extended weather like this at all last year.

It's beginning to look a lot like winter

Adjusting my goals

Based on everything I'm still dealing with health-wise and how I've missed some training, and how terribly Saturday's race went, I'm adjusting goals for Kiawah and moving my goal race back to Save the Light Half Marathon on February 3. I'm hoping this gives me enough time to recover and get my shiznit together.

So with that, Kiawah will just be a training run, a practice race for the goal race. I'm so out of the racing loop that I've also forgotten how to do that, too (another issue I had on Saturday). I'm 12 weeks out from Save the Light, so that's a fresh training cycle right there and my base is built up much better than it was going into Kiawah training.

To get myself back up to speed (literally and metaphorically), I'm adding a bunch of 5Ks onto my calendar to use a speedwork. None of them are goal races, so I'm not out for PRs. My goals with those are to remember how to race, practice how to race, and actually do some speedwork.

Speedwork is always the first thing that falls off my calendar during busy weeks since it requires a higher cognitive load for me and sometimes my brain just can't handle it and needs to go easy. I updated my race calendar and signed up for a bunch of those races. This coming Saturday, I'm doing the Ultra Chili 5K. It's a trail race and because of that, it will be more about race practice than speedwork since it's trail.

So here I am. Adjusting my race calendar, goals and expectations (again, like always) and hoping for the best. Onward.

In non-workout-related news - I picked up a part-time gig as a design blog editor for a leading company in the tech industry. I'm super excited for this new endeavor since it's different than what I do in my day-to-day user experience and product design job. And it's not a freelance gig, either.

While I love my freelance gigs, they can be much more unsteady (projects freezing or shifting, delayed timelines, etc), which makes the income more unsteady. So I like the stability of two solid jobs while I pick up freelance here and there.