Baby Steps and Giant Strides

My former boss is running a half marathon with her husband this week, the Urban Wildland Half Marathon.  This is a shout out to her, wishing her good luck and remember to use the bathroom early on!

I haven’t blogged much this week because there hasn’t been much to blog about. We suspended our runs until the air quality improves and the temperature goes down. With it being 90+ degrees every day this week and pollution/air quality warnings running a muck, Andy and I decided it would be unwise to try and run. Even at 9p.m. at night, it’s too hot to run and running later than that is just silly.

I have been trying to do more cross training this week so that I’m not sitting completely on my butt, and I can do that indoors (in our air conditioned house -wee!).

I will update more, and let you know when we start running again.

*On Your Porch, by The Format

The Twin Cities have continued to be riddled with pollution warnings this summer. It makes me anxious, but Andy and I have been trying our best to run later in the days or early for the longer runs.

It’s also supposed to be ridiculously hot all week long.

I’m really good at composing my posts while on the run. Lately, it’s been hard to put them into actuality.

Andy and I both hit a wall in running where we were a bit sick of running every day, which translated into I didn’t feel like posting either. But, I promised to post the good and the bad, so here I am, kicking my butt.

We got over that feeling, by the way.

Despite being sick of running for awhile, we’ve managed to reach our time goals for almost all of our runs, which is encouraging.

So my question, to runners and non-runners alike, how do you overcome the mental blocks you have?

Or fight. Apparently I was feisty Saturday morning when Andy and I embarked on our 9 mile run, which made me angry for exactly the first half of the run.  Anger makes running hard, but at the same time, it gave me a really good pace!  Fortunately, we were able to match that pace for the second half, and made it home.  Our goal on the second long run was to get home, however possible (meaning running or walking).  A goal for that run and the next was to push beyond when I wanted to stop running, and to keep running for a bit. That worked.

New goal: For the long runs, stick to a marathon pace or better to build marathon endurance.  Up till now, we had been pushing, but not setting any time goals necessarily. Now – kick it in high gear. For 14 more weeks.

Continuing Goal that I fail at: Hydration.