Speedy Feet-Life After Half Marathon Training

Happy Sunday! I’m currently holed up in a coffeeshop. It is such a beautiful day, so I biked off campus, books in tow, with the intention of spending all day doing schoolwork in a coffeeshop. However, I realized I forgot to bring several items critical to me actually doing my work, but I still want to spend a little time here, since I made the effort to bike all the way here. 

A cappuccino, as always. I actually slept pretty late this morning. I stayed up late last night doing pretty wild things- helping my roommate start a food blog, reading my old blog posts, watching a Biochem lecture for fun, and rearranging my furniture at 1am. I’m clearly the life of the party. 

Also, I may finally be pumpkined out. For a snack, I had this:

Pumpkin bread, cottage cheese with pumpkin butter and sunflower seed butter, and a pumpkin spice chai latte. 

But I may or may not have had pumpkin bread for breakfast….

A few things though-this is the video I was watching: Sugar: The Bitter Truth. If you do anything today, please please please watch this! It’s one of my favorite videos, and this stuff is basically what I want to spend my life studying-and it’s been way too long since I last watched it!

Also-guess what? Instead of taking another Chem lab next quarter, I’m taking Human Nutrition, a higher level class than the Intro to Nutrition class I took last fall. I’m really excited-except that after I take this class, I’ll have taken all the Nutrition classes at my school. Yes, all 2. 

When I was helping my roommate figure out some blog things, I got sucked into reading some of my first blog posts. And possibly making fun of my past self a little bit. If you’re interested, here’s my first post. I think this was really great for me to re-read, because it reminds me of why I initially started blogging. 

I also read a lot of the posts from when I was rowing. It really made me miss rowing! I miss my teammates, being part of a team, and just in general doing a sport. However, there is a lot that sounds pretty torturous. Like my post titled “Cold and Wet…Again.” Key phrases such as “day 2 of our 3 workouts a day,” “it was sooo cold,” and “it started pouring while we were in the boat.” Yeah, given I’m such a wimp in the cold, it’s no wonder I got mono!

I read through some of the posts from last winter-I feel like my eating was a little more interesting, but I’m definitely in a much better place mentally now than I was then. 

Anyway, since I crave workout structure, I decided that I’m going to follow a Cross Country training plan in preparation for PRing a 5k in December. I’m actually super excited for this-there are lots of speed workouts, which are always fun, plus the runs are a lot shorter than my half training, so it will be a really nice change. I’m tentatively planning to always run in the morning, so I have some sort of structure in my schedule. Plus, that’s one of the times I know the track team isn’t practicing on the track. 

Also, if you’re wondering, the time I’m trying to beat is 24:58. I think it’s definitely doable-I hadn’t run much before that race, but I was in awesome rowing shape, so it will be interesting to see how fast I can get in the next 8 weeks or so. 

But I may or may not have ulterior motives than just PRing-last year I placed 5th in my division-and top 3 get medals. If I can break 24:00, I have a decent shot at placing. The only problem? I have absolutely no idea how fast I am right now-my last timed mile was 8:00, but that was when I was just coming off of Mono, and hadn’t run in many months. 

But here’s the thing-the only chance I might really have to place in races is while I’m still in the same age division-and in at my next birthday, I’ll move up a division. In my division, I was actually able to come in first in my 10k a year ago. So I think I need to run a ton of 5 and 10ks before I get any older! It’s definitely nice to have something different to train for-I’m really excited! I still miss my team sports though. There’s a running club, but my friends who regularly go basically told me I’d have to be able to run 10 miles at a 6:00 pace. Yeah, not happening. 

So, I mapped out a new running schedule for myself, and I’m going to spend the weeks leading up to my race getting fast, strong, and building endurance. One other thing I realized when I was reading my old posts was that I never really go into much detail about my workouts anymore-and my blog is called “FITNESS is Sweet.” So I’ll make sure to add more detail on those! I’m really excited for my new training-I start in a week, after one more long run. 

Sidenote-on my long run, if for some reason something goes wrong and I can’t finish, the place where I’d be when that might likely happen just so happens to be at my favorite froyo place. So even if I can’t finish, it’s a win-win, right??
And my roommate and I are officially the most popular people in our dorm.

We put out candy yesterday and it was gone within an hour, so I had to restock! I lovelovelove that I still get to buy Halloween candy, even though I’m in a dorm!

Bloggers-do you ever read your old posts? Thoughts on them?