Let's talk about training.

First of alll....who can guess what I will be doing at 10 am tomorrow?!?!
Well..I will be sitting in Diagnostics class, but that isn't the point.  I will have my laptop with me and I will be putting that sweet sweet info in to sign me up for BOSTON!

Now this is actually a somewhat scary thing to be doing, because as you may recall, the glorious marathon that allowed me to sign up in the 10+ minutes faster than your BQ category happened almost an entire year ago.  And the year of running that has followed has been, in a word, shit. I have had motivation issues, injury issues, health issues, the fun has been never ending, and I have lost a lot of fitness.  But there is no way I'm wasting my 3:22 when I could race in my own backyard with all of my friends cheering me on in 2013, no freaking way. And I am bound and determined to put all of my life junk behind me, get my butt in gear, and spend the next 8 months getting ready to kill it in April.

So the real question is - how am I planning on regaining my long lost fitness? I'm thinking that cardiovascular fitness is going to be the easy part, since it's not like I haven't been running at ALL...my guess is my issue is going to be my legs.  Which, really, has always been my issue. So you know what that means...what up, strength training.  Yesterday was day 1 of my grand master Boston plan, which consisted of going for a run AND doing a strength workout...quite possibly for the first time since high school.  The run was sucky, since Boston apparently decided that 84 degrees and humid in September is it's new thing, and then I headed to the gym to do strength. I did a pretty standard set of lower body exercises, 3 sets of 10 each. (Fun PT fact! The ideal number of sets/reps for strength building is 3 x 8-12. Anything higher than that and you're more looking at building endurance.) All of them were just body weight except for squats + lunges, where I really upped the game and added 2 5lb weights.  Here's the sad part...I am SO. SORE.  Clearly this is an indication of the sad state of my legs, but the soreness also tells me that if I keep doing this, I WILL get stronger. And that is definitely a good thing.

As far as actual running is concerned, the plan for right now is: do it.  4 days a week ain't gonna cut it anymore. I really don't feel like I need to be doing speedwork or any insane long runs until I build up a reasonable base to start, and the first step in doing that is getting my ass out the door and running 5-8 miles every. single. day. The end.

I was going to write about my new guilty pleasure, Dance Moms, but then it got late. And I need to go running. Sooo you'll have to wait for that...I know you're crushed.