A new 5K PR…sorta

Oh, hey there Monday. Why do you come so quickly? Especially, after amazing fall weather weekends. Hope you guys all had the wonderful fall weather we did this weekend. Sunny + 65-70 the entire time. Perfect! If you need a refresher because hopefully you were outside enjoying the weekend, here you go.

• We celebrated our 5 year anniversary with one of Ulysses favorites: Almond Apple Cake.
• I caved and opened another can of pumpkin to make a delicious Pumpkin Banana Smoothie.
• We celebrated “Baby Z” at my friend Melissa’s baby shower.

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Sometimes I struggle to figure out how to balance my food/recipe posts with my running/workout posts during the week. So, as I train for the Philadelphia half marathon at the end of November, I’ve decided to use Monday’s post as the weekly round-up of my workouts and how I stuck (or didn’t) to the training plan.

Ready?

Here’s what the plan for this week was supposed to look like:

Here’s what actually happened:

Not too shabby. It was week 1 so I was pretty diligent about sticking to the plan.

Monday:

Long run day. No excuses. I ran this at lunch time since it wasn’t really “long” and let’s just say I misjudged how hot it was outside. It was close to 80 degrees, I brought no water and I suffered through this run big time. I ended up finishing with a 9:12 average pace which isn’t horrible or anything but it was just a tough run mentally and physically.

Tuesday:

The basement gym area was still not put together enough after the flooding for me to do my NROLFW on Tuesday so I ended up pushing it to Wednesday. Stretching was done on the floor with Ginger basically on top of me the entire time.

Wednesday:

15 miles on the bike @14.4 mph average and NROLFW, not a bad day.

Thursday:

Oh, speed work. Thursday was freezing for September. I ran this outside with the help of my Garmin since the treadmill is dead and expected to hate this workout given the nature of it + the cold. Turns out, it was a great speed work session and I ended up shaving off 30 seconds from my intended 400 pace with ease. Guess I set the bar too low there.

Friday:

Glorious rest day, enjoyed fully by celebrating our anniversary.

Saturday:

10.4 miles on the bike @14.3 mph average. I was supposed to do NROLFW (starting stage 3) but since I was planning to race on Sunday, I figured I would skip this to make sure I had fresh legs for the race. Well…

Sunday:

Woke up to the alarm at 6am and a house that was a chilly 65 and totally blew off the race. Sleep + a warm bed won out. This race was literally 5 minutes from my house but, they closed the road off an hour before the race started so I would’ve had to be at the start area more than an hour before just to sit there and wait. I’m really not a morning person, at all and that was just the icing on the cake. This is the first race I said I was going to do that I skipped and I felt incredibly guilty all morning. I blame the Catholic upbringing.

Anyway, I was still determined to get the mileage in so, around noon I set off on what I intended to be a fast 5K of my own. Check out these splits:

• Mile 1: 7:59
• Mile 2: 7:58
• Mile 3: 7:57
• Mile 3-3.1: 0:46 (7:00 pace)
• Total: 24:36  <—NEW PR! (by 3 seconds)

Moral of this story? I should’ve gotten my ass out of bed and raced! Serves me right.

Total Weekly Round-up:

• Run: 11.6 miles
• Bike: 25.7 miles
• Strength training sessions: 1

What’s your opinion: does a PR count outside of a race?

What was your best workout last week?

Tagged as: NROLFW, running