2 x 2.39 miles

I'm back.

I've been away from the blog for over a month...because I sort of stopped running for about a month.  I'm not quite sure what happened.  Some of it, I'm sure, is lack of willpower.  You skip one day, and then another, and then before you know it, it's as if you never tried to begin a running program in the first place.

That, and lots of evening meetings.  When I have evening meetings, I tend to stay at church through the afternoon, and I don't always come to church equipped with running clothes.  I've also had an unusually high number of late-afternoon meetings that bleed into evening meetings, with very little opportunity to run, even if I remembered to bring running clothes.  And mornings are pretty much useless.  It's dark and I'm sleepy and even if I could manage to pull myself out of bed, I don't like running in the morning anyway.  I don't run well when my body isn't fully awake.

We had no Confirmation this past Thursday, and being free on a Thursday afternoon/evening felt so bizarre and liberating that the first thing I wanted to do when I got home in the afternoon was go for a jog.  I ran a route that I've run only a couple times before, along a nearby street that is a straight shot down to the next major road.  Our neighborhood is full of twisty, short, dead-ending roads, so this particular road is one of very few that actually go through.  I ran it on Thursday (it was a little much for me, so I walked a bit, but really tried to push myself to run most of it).  And then, after taking the weekend off of running (for no particular reason), I ran the same route again yesterday afternoon.

When last I ran this route, I looked it up on gmaps pedometer, and I thought that it was a 2-mile route.  But when I just looked it up again for the purposes of titling this post, it turns out that the route is a bit longer.

Both of my recent runs along this route have been pretty good.  I've walked a little, but really worked hard to push myself to keep running when, at other points, I might have stopped.  I've quickened my pace just the slightest bit, and even though I'm running faster and harder, I'm much more comfortable and feel more efficient.  Overall, the new pace just feels better.

I was thinking last night that if I can push myself to successfully RUN the entire 5k in November (without walking), and if I keep up this new, slightly faster pace, I should easily be able to shave a couple minutes off of my slow, 34-minute time from last year.  It's a nice goal.