Tempo Thursday - Again

Well - I'm back into a training cycle! I made it to this week's Scheduled Rest Day in decent enough shape. I'm physically tired (slept an extra hour this morning). If I include the days I trained at the back end of last week, I'm at 7 days in a row. I have a short "long" run on Saturday (9 miles this week), which will put me into triple digits for the month of February. This is the first month over 100 miles since last November. Now to just keep myself healthy so I can stay here!

Yesterday's run was an indication that things are close to being back to pre-injury/illness days. I went out the San Diego Creek Trail for a 45 minute tempo run. I break my tempo runs into a 10 minute warm up at heart rate below 85% MHR, a warm down in the same range, and the rest of the run at LT (between 85% and 93% MHR). I ended up doing 4.83 miles at an average pace of 9:18 (includes warm up and warm down), and all within the desire heart range. I felt pretty fatigued when I was done, but I'm not complaining. A couple of weeks ago I would have been sucking wind during the warm up!

There was one thing I caught myself doing during my run yesterday that I need to work on. I found that I tense up during a run. I felt like I was not bending my knees and actually shuffling along. I know that if I relax and let my legs take care of themselves, I will probably run more efficiently. I'm going to be watching that over the next few weeks training. In the meantime - good luck to all those racing this weekend!

And now for some fun stuff, Nikemom is having her T.G.I.F. Foto Friday again. This week there's a theme: "America's Next Top Runner". I submit for your approval:

This was taken last year at a local 10K/5K/Kid's run that benefits local schools. I have yet to see a photo as cute as this one!