A good running week

This has been a good week for running, probably the best in a while.  I’m starting to feel like a competent runner again. 

The first highlight of the week came from breaking in two new pairs of running shoes.  New running shoes always make me happy, and since these shoes were mostly funded by a mother’s day gift from my mother-in-law, they made me extra happy! J  I got the Brooks Pure Flow 2 and the Nike Pegasus some number or another.  I’ve run in versions of both these shoes before and look forward to training in the new versions.

After weeks of all my runs being easy paced miles, trying to get my legs re-used to the impact, I felt like I could start including some quality training runs.  So one of my weekday runs was a hill repeat run.  It felt great to push that hard, but it was sad how hard the hills were. 

I also did a long run of 8 miles and ended up with 25 miles for the week!  I’m pretty sure it’s been since December for both of those mileages.

Best of all, this morning I got to run outside with Elisha.  This was my first opportunity for an outside run since late last fall when I decided that the treadmill was a better place for a pregnant me to run.  I was so tired of only running on the treadmill that even a rainy run outside felt amazing!  Plus it’s always great to catch up with a fun running buddy I haven’t seen in way too long.

Running with a baby in the house

Running these days is such an interesting challenge.  First there’s the exhaustion to overcome. I’ve never done well with less than adequate amounts of sleep, and finally the weeks of being woken up every hour or two is starting to show.  It’s a good thing I’ve trained myself to run when I’m tired from all the morning running during marathon training because I’ve definitely been relying on that mental push to get myself going.  Of course once I’m running it feels great.

Then there’s the trickiness of timing.  I have to balance when I’ve last eaten with when Ian has last eaten and is likely to sleep or play with my mom long enough for me to get in a run.  This is not an easy thing to manage because Ian isn’t on any sort of eating or sleeping schedule.  Sometimes he’ll eat, fall asleep, and it looks like a good time to run, but I’ll be really hungry or full.  Then by the time I am ready to run, Ian is ready to eat again. 

Right now I am just trying to regain fitness and build up miles so interruptions and changing my runs around are not as big of a deal.  Hopefully when I start getting more serious about training, Ian will have settled more into a schedule I can work around.