Time to Rethink Things

Well, it seems like things have not gone the way I wanted them to. They've actually gone better! I set two goals when I started running. After my first week of averaging around 3.5 miles in my 60 minute run, I set the first goal of hitting 4.5 miles by the end of March and the second goal of hitting 5 miles by the end of April. Well, I hit the first one last weekend a week earlier than expected. After taking off Wednesday, I hit 5.01 yesterday a full month early! Now, I have no idea why I was able to jump a full quarter mile between my two runs. Could be any number of things. Conditioning is my most educated guess. I have been eating better yet. Smaller portions! I snack about 3 times a day on stuff like Chex Mix or beef jerky. I think my body is just getting used to it. I didn't sweat nearly as much as I would have a week ago. When I started getting close to my first mile, I noticed that it was just about 12:30 minutes in. At twelve minutes a mile, I'd end up at 5 miles in the hour. The second mile was almost equally close. By the time I was hitting the third mile I kinda laughed to myself because I thought "There is no way I am gonna do this already". When I hit the fourth mile at 48:05 I knew it was on!

I think I ran more often at speeds of around 7.6-8.0 mph than usual. It used to be that my high running speed was around 5.5- 6.0 mph. I also started running earlier in. Typically, I will start with around 3-4 minutes of walking at about 4 mph. I'm definitely gonna go back to that tomorrow afternoon when I hit it up again. Today's Friday and I take it off. My legs feel great! I am nowhere near as muscle-sore as I used to be. I think a realistic goal for me is to hit 5.25 miles by the end of April. I have a sneaking suspicion that I will plateau somewhere. God knows I'd love to keep advancing at this rate though! For a visual of where I started and where I am check out the graphs to the left. The top one represents my distance run and the bottom is my caloric burn.

Now that I have hit 5 miles, I am going to start working on my abs. Gonna start out doing about 100 crunches a day maybe 3-4 times a week. We'll see what happens with that.