95 Days Until the Disney Princess Half Marathon

Well obviously I fell off the wagon. I let life get in the way big time. I kept changing training plans and not sticking to them. I finally got in touch with an amazing blogger and certified running coach and she wrote me a custom plan. I don't want to link to her because I don't think she commonly writes plans, but maybe I can check with her and just leave a link to her blog (she has tons of blog posts that are super helpful to new runners as well as a ton of beginner training plans for people who are thinking about starting to run or even walk long distances).

Anyway, I have COMMITTED to completing the entire plan. It's 14 weeks until the Princess. I'm going to use my blog to document my training. She said I could email her weekly with updates and I figure I'll send her a short overview of how I did and a link to these posts and she can read my REALLY in depth recaps here if she wants. 

For week one I had to move the plan around because I know I don't have time to get to the gym on Thanksgiving day, but since I knew that in advance I planned to do Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday this week. Next week we will return to regularly scheduled programming (Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday).

When she wrote the plan for me she emailed me and said that it was going to be hard and I would feel like I wanted to quit. SHE WASN'T KIDDING! Day one was ROUGH. I probably should have told her I was running at at a slower pace to start, but I completed every second of the workout the way she wrote it. Here are the stats from my first workout:

So my average heart rate was 164 BPM throughout the workout and my max was 187 BPM. The first two intervals weren't horrible. I was pushing hard toward the end of the second but I did okay and then I recovered. The third one was really hard but I powered through. I struggled a lot there the last minute. Then the fourth one came and I hoped someone would walk in the door and shoot me and put me out of my misery! The fifth one was really hard too but mentally since I knew it was the last one I had to do, it was easier than the fourth. 

My pace overall was 18:47, which is promising. I was averaging a 19:00 min/mile recently, so I chopped some time off of that which was great. 13 seconds a mile seems pretty amazing to me. Especially when I need to cut off 3 mins a mile and add a WHOLE LOT of distance. 

As a side note, I also started logging my food on MyFitnessPal this week. Great week to do it I guess.... Thanksgiving. I am doing really well so far (I say this on day three, the day before Thanksgiving). I've planned to go over on Thanksgiving day. I am okay with that. If I just eat what I've planned though I think it will be okay. 

I guess that's everything I've got for now. Hopefully I will start writing again, more frequently. I have a 30 minute walk on deck for this evening, so I'll write again soon about that. 

Melissa <3