Weekly workouts: Half marathon training week 4 (12/1-12/7) - postpartum week 24

And another awesome week in the books. Again not quite as much mileage as I would have liked, but I'm seeing speed gains on a regular basis. The past few weeks, I haven't been as good at getting my morning core workouts in and that needs to change in the coming weeks because I can feel a difference when I miss those.

The 21 day challenge is going relatively well. Although, I had some struggles toward the end of the week with actually forgetting to eat because I was really busy trying to wrap up a project at work. One minute it was 5:30 a.m. and I was eating breakfast and the next it was noon and I hadn't eaten or drank anything since 5:30. Oops. This happened on the day before the Reindeer Run, so I felt pretty depleted during that race, but still managed to run both a course PR and a post-baby PR (recap on the way!).

My running group had our first hill repeats for this training cycle at the Ravenel Bridge on Tuesday and I could feel the improvements since the last round of hill repeats. We did a 1 mile easy warmup and 1 mile easy cool down as a group, and my hill repeat pace was around an 8-minute mile.

And then Sunday's awesome run happened. I missed the long run with my training group since I had the race on Saturday, so I was on my own this week. I headed out for a nice, easy run, and that ended up being 6.25 miles at an 8:48 pace. The day after I post-baby PR'd at a race. Improvements indeed. At this rate, I think I'll quickly be passing my old pre-pregnancy paces and chasing down some new PRs.

The week in workouts

Monday: