Where Have I Been??

Where have I been, indeed! My calendar says that theoretically I am at the end of Week 9 of Team Vegan training...but Life happens and really I am not that far along.

Sedentarism is a hard habit to beat, and as I force myself out the door to do my run it's sometimes the ONLY thing I think about as I plod along.

Let's see...my last post was back in my innocent days of Team Vegan Week 2...aah, the easy runs. Here's what happened after that:

Week 3 - 2/10-17 - kept up with training! Yay me!
Week 4 - 2/18-24 - Nada. Sheer laziness. I spent a lot of time surfing on those evenings.
Week 5 - 2/25-3/2 - kept up with training! Yay me!
Week 6 - 3/3-9 - Nada. Sheer laziness wins out again.
Week 7 - 3/10-3/16 - legitimate Nada - raging sinus infection, some lung congestion , too.
Week 8 - 3/17-23 - Nada. Maybe legitimate - sinus infection still on the mend, but still having sore throat and general nose issues.
Week 9 - 3/24-30 - Panic setting in as I realize race day is almost here...

So, Honest Runner that I am, I must confess that I have not been keeping up with the training program. I can point to a couple of setbacks after my glorious Week 2 runs in the Park. In Week 3, I again tried to run in the park, one time running after work, which I thought was really cool. But when I tried this run-after-work scenario again, the weather was cold and blustery and I started too late. So that particular run was discouraging. I wound up walking most of it AND getting terribly cold while walking back to the office.

The sinus infection was a major bummer. I don't want to whine about it too much, but I'll just say that I'm still trying to get over it. It's not an acute sinus issue anymore, more of a chronic one that makes me feel like I'm operating at only 90% instead of 100%.

Consequently, every workout starts out with a major pep talk, since I feel a little crummy and though I feel much better afterwards, it's still hard to get started. Poor me, I know.

So, where do I stand now? Well, for one, I'm glad that I signed up for only a 10K. I've changed my long run (and race) strategy to 5-minute run/1-minute walk intervals instead of trying to keep a steady pace, since I'm pretty sure that I would fail at that. My run today was a test run, to see if the interval strategy will work, and I think it will. I was able to run 6.44 miles in 1.25 hours. I had to push myself for every minute of running in the last couple of intervals, but I did it! If the conditions at Santa Cruz are not too adverse, I should be able to complete the race.

But I'm worried. Santa Cruz is supposedly a hilly course -- so that might kill me. And if there's any headwind, well, that will poop me out -- there was a stretch on my run today that was straight into a north wind. Those intervals were the hardest to run.

Anyway, that's enough negativity...I accomplished a long run with less than adequate preparation and it didn't kill me!

A part of me wonders: If I had kept up with my blogging through the month of March, maybe I would have better at keeping up with my training...

Nature sightings: On today's run I saw the first western kingbird of the season, some swallows, a dead robin (so sad), a black phoebe, and two of the friendliest yellow labs you could hope to meet. Good stuff!