A January Update

So what's been going on? Well, deer season sort of took over most of December then there was the Christmas festivities. I began lifting weights before Christmas and have continued to do so till now. I've put on about 4 pounds since early December so I hope that is from the weight lifting and not anything else? My running has been cut in half. I'm getting in 2 or maybe 3 quality runs a week. Last weekend I ran 20 with my buddy Lee. It was a beautiful run from Lewisburg out into the countryside. I ran my mouth the entire time and it went by fast. We ran slow doing it in about 3:33. Afterwards I had the usual completely consuming lactic acid burning pain. But after about 30 minutes it was gone and I got back to normal. I spent the rest of the day shopping Lowes/WalMart and then coming home to finish my inside steps.

This week I ran twice. Once around the Hinton loop in about 33 minutes (4.3 miles) and once to Talcott from PS and back (11.25 @ 8:04 pace). I'm not necessarily getting any faster right now but I seem to be recovering from my runs very quickly. Probably due to the fact I'm resting several days in between! My plan right now is to keep with the weight lifting, and try to do a long slow run every other weekend. In this case, long would be more than say 12 miles. I hope to do long runs till March and then focus on getting faster with track work once a week. I'm not going to run a spring marathon and one of my favorite races, the Blacksburg 10 miler doesn't look like it's going to happen. So blah on that. I am really looking forward to my two team events tentatively scheduled for April and July (Greenbrier River Race, and Scenic Mountain Tri).

We are in the midst of winter now but running sort of combats the weather in a way. You pick the days that are somewhat nice and you run and you feel better.