Learned & Loved: January 28-February 3

{What I Learned & Loved!  A short and sweet recap of my previous (running) week: ideas of what worked for me so I can do it again in the future, things to change and highlight(s) of my week. This will be something I can reference down the road in training cycles, when I'm struggling or when I feel like things are going well.}

Learned: Running fast and feeling good one day does not mean that running fast will feel good another day. On Thursday, when the weather looked like this (note wind speed) I had 8 miles on the schedule with some mile repeats and short recoveries. 

I planned to do this run in the morning, but after being woken up at 4am and again at 6:30am from wind that sounded worse than Hurricane Irene or Sandy, along with rain slapping against our windows, I postponed this run until the afternoon.  That meant I had all day to read on Twitter about how windy it was and how hard it was to run south, straight into a tailwind. People were NOT kidding. With my schedule calling for 4 x 1 mile @ 7:15, I tried to plan out my route as best I could so the repeats would come while running north. But obviously, I can't run north all the time, so I had to suck it up and run some/parts of repeats straight into the wind. My miles came out at 7:09, 7:25 (straight into the wind and was giving it everything), 7:13 and 7:11 and after this run, I felt awesome!

On Sunday, my schedule called for 8 miles again, with 3 x 1 mile at 7:35 with 1 minute recovery. This, I thought, would be easy after Thursday's run, but I struggled more with this run. Fortunately, Jess ran with me, so I had someone to keep pushing me when I really didn't feel like it. This run, even without the wind, felt so much harder to me than Thursday. I think my body was just getting progressively more tired as the week went on and I just didn't have the energy for this run. BUT, we did it anyway! Splits came out to be 7:35, 7:25 (thanks, Jess!) and 7:32. 

Loved:  While some runs this week felt really hard, I'm really happy that I hit all of my paces (with the exception of the mile straight into the wind above!) and got in all my miles for the week. This was my highest mileage week since the Philadelphia Marathon, clocking in at 34 miles. That's nearly twice as many miles as I've ever run for half marathon training in the past, so I'm excited to see what the NYC Half in March brings!

What did you learn this week? What did you love?