Monday, April 8, 2013

And immediately a change in plans

So I sent my husband the training plan, and he said great but.....

He mentioned that perhaps this would be ambitious while we are working on selling the house, what with showings and 30 minutes to get the birds and GTFO and probably this being a lot on nights and weekends.

He knows how frustrated I tend to get when my plans don't work.  So.....

I am holding this plan for the 2nd half of the year and going into a 12 week Novice 1 Hal Higdon Half Marathon Plan.

Because I can be taught.

Friday, April 5, 2013

I think I should start spring training now

Then again, I think spring should have started by now too so we all know how that works.  BUT.  I have been reading Run Less, Run Faster and I have decided to give it a shot.  I've based my training on a 39 minute 5k time (which is somewhere between my fastest and my slowest) and I've set it up to start the week after I get back from DAR State Conference.  In between I'm going to try to do a little base building, which is what I've been trying to do for the last month and failing.  ANYWAY.

So my first week of training will look like this:

April 23 - Track Repeats - 8 repeats of 400 meters with a 400 meter recovery interval - target pace for repeats is 2:58 (I've never done repeats, but I understand I can program my trusty Garmin to yell at me appropriately)

April 24 - Cross Training - I am going to use the bike with the trainer for this - 10 minutes easy, 8 minutes tempo, 7 minutes easy (tempo should correspond to about short sentence effort)

April 25 - Tempo Run - 5k (3.1 miles) at 12:50 pace

April 26 - Cross Training - 10 minutes easy, 10 minutes tempo, 5 minutes easy

April 28 - Long Run - 10k (6.1 miles) at 13:20 pace

I know I can do the paces for everything but track and I understand that is supposed to be my major hard workout every week.  I am going for an improved 10k time.  My last 10k was about 1:20 and that was planned as I took it really, really easy.  This 12 week plan will get me through to July, although my goal 10k is actually at the end of June.

Can I work out 5 days a week and keep it up?  Who knows.  I like that the cross training can be done indoors and it is in minutes so should only eat a half hour of my day.  I'm a slow runner, so a simple 5k takes 40 minutes if I don't drive to the park to do it.  Add driving to the park and it takes an hour of my day.

If the plan is too ambitious, I can always recalculate.  But the point is for it to be hard.  Here's to hard work.

Monday, April 1, 2013

It hasn't been much of a week for workouts

So last week was another exercise bust for the most part.  I got in my 5k for jelly bean.  And we spent 6 hours on Saturday painting and another 4 on Sunday scrubbing hardwood floors, so counted 6 points toward my workouts there.  My legs are killing me from doing the painters squats.

The TV room is finished:


 The dining room no longer has wallpaper:
 And the room where we used to have the dining room furniture has been transformed into a formal type living room:

I cannot tell you how different this all looks.  It is very fresh and clean and pretty and if all of our stuff fit and we had a bathtub I could soak in and maybe a better kitchen we might stay.