It's Go Time!

Kimi is finally back to running with me! Thankfully. I love to run, but it's so nice to have someone that helps keep you motivated and honest. Last week was a great week. With the weather getting nicer, it has become much easier to lace up the shoes and go for a run. I had a solid week running every day of the week. I came close to messing it up Friday when thankfully Kimi persuaded me to going out and put in my easy 3 miles. Of course, I had to talk her into riding the bike with me, but I managed to get out there and do it. On Saturday, we decided to do a progression run. For those of you that don't know exactly what a progression run is, I'll detail it a bit. A progression run is a run where you start off conservative (easy) and slowly speed up the pace each mile. We started out with a 7:08, dropped it to 6:54, and then made it interesting with a 6:30, 6:27, 6:14, and 6:09. Then followed it up with a simple cool down of 7:14. Since Kimi is recovering from her illness, she went 7 miles, and I went back out to get my 8th mile at a nice easy pace. 

Saturday was a pretty exciting day in general. For those of you that have been following my blog, you know that we just recently purchased our first home and are doing quite a few changes to it. One of those changes is outside in regards to a few trees. There are quite a few oak trees on our little lot and one of them was directly in front of our front door. Unfortunately, it was starting to get pretty dead looking and kind of ugly so we decided we would cut it down to make the house look that much better from the street. My brother and his two boys came to town to help along with my in-laws Bill and Lynn. We cut down the oak with no problems whatsoever which made a huge difference for how the front yard feels. Then came the fun stuff. We had 6 trees in our back yard. Now 5. I had intentions of taking two trees down in the back yard simply because they were a little too cluttered together and because I was hoping to open up a little sunlight so I can grow a small garden out back. We have a fairly small yard and there are a few power lines that run near the alley-way behind our house. We started with the smaller of the two trees I intended to take down. In order to be 100% certain we wouldn't come anywhere close to the power lines, we decided to cut the tree down from about 17 feet up. So I climbed the ladder, strapped myself to the tree just below where I wanted to cut and had at it. The idea was to cut a wedge in the side of the tree to make the tree fall towards the center of the yard.  Let's just say, I went slightly too deep with my horizontal cut of the wedge which basically led the tree to fall the opposite direction. Even when it started falling, it didn't fully make it to the ground. The tree was now wedged between another tree's branch and its own trunk. And worst of all, the chainsaw was now being pinched and so the troubles began.

After a good 20+ minutes of trying to cut the rest of the way through the tree with a hand saw (not a sharp blade of course) to make it fall, I finally decided to climb down and take a break. In doing so, my brother, Bill, and I grabbed the rope that was tied to the hanging part of the tree. We did just a few strong tugs on the rope getting the tree to shake back and forth when finally, we heard a crack and down it went.  Though it didn't go exactly as planned, everything worked out just great in the end.

That was the majority of my Saturday adventure. Sunday, Kim and I decided to head up to the Frisco trail to do our long run for the week. The weather was a bit chilly but otherwise not too bad. I was scheduled to do a 14 mile run and Kimi was shooting for 10 miles. Thanks to our long day of work the day before, our run wasn't blazing fast. Not that it was terribly slow either (still under 7 min mile avg) but not as good as we are accustomed to for our long runs.

To wrap things up, I can definitely feel myself getting more and more motivated along with excited about the next 6-8 months of training. I still have intentions on hitting 3,000 miles this year but that means I am going to have to do a lot of higher mileage over the next several months to get there. If you take my average weekly mileage up to this point, I think I'm on pace for only about 2100 or so. Thankfully we are only about 12 weeks in so there is plenty of time to increase the weakly average.

Week In Review
Mileage Goal = 54
Actual Mileage = 54
Long Run Goal = 14
Actual Long run = 14

Going to have to turn it around and quickly!

This year has been a tough one so far. I'm not going to make any excuses for how poor my training has been so far this year. All I know is that if I want to get back to or even close to the level I was at a year ago, I am going to have to get myself out of this rut of lazy training and get focused on a good and challenging goal.  Two years ago, Kim and I both broke 3000 miles in a year.  Last year, though not quite as good, still had 2600+ miles.  This year, I'm on pace for nearly 1800 miles. That's just not going to cut it if I want to perform at my top level again. So what is this goal? And how on earth do I turn it around?  Well, it sounds simple, but in reality, changing a trend can be tough. It all starts by taking it one day at a time. The change in the weather should be a huge boost in itself because let's face it, running in shorts is way better than tights or pants. I'm also going to place goal cards on the wall in the bathroom (don't have a mirror yet) and motivational cards around the bedroom that will help change the intensity of our focus. All in all, the only way to buck the trend is to get out there and start putting in the work stringing run after run together to a point where not running starts to feel like an impossible option because things are going so well that you simply don't want to stop. The goal is to get my miles above 50 this week and then above 60 for about 13 straight weeks prior to the Grandma's marathon in June.

I had the most lazy week of running last week and I used the excuse that my running partner has been ill all week.  I feel terrible going out and doing runs when I know she wants to so badly but can't. All I can do is hope that she gets well soon so we can start pushing each other forwards towards our goals.

On a bright side, our house is coming along nicely. We have been painting trim, doors, door jams, and closet shelves like crazy.  It's pretty exciting to see it slowly coming together. It won't be long until we get to a point where all we'll have left to do is flooring and then a slight makeover to the kitchen. All in all, it's going quite well.

First Room All finished! :)

This week goal: 50 miles + Running
Finish Painting Doors and Door Jams
3 minutes of Abs Daily