It feels a little weird writing about only one week of running so soon after writing a post about an entire year.
Also, I could have posted this on Sunday, but I figured I’d wait a day since I just posted my Yearly Wrap-Up for 2016.
One year ends and another begins.
Weight Check: Can I leave this blank? No? Well, OK. On Sunday morning, pre-run, I was at 166.6, up 4.8 pounds from my last official weigh-in on December 23. OK, it was 9 days, not 7, and my previous weigh-in was post-run, but still, it was not a good 9 days. There wasn’t a lot of Mountain Dew for a change, only when I had to drive, but I ate a lot, and I drank a lot of beer. Hopefully this week I’ll dry out a bit.
| Day | Total Miles |
|---|---|
| Monday | 5.01 |
| Wednesday | 5.11 |
| Thursday | 8.12 |
| Friday | 6.16 |
| Sunday | 4.17 |
Total: 28.57 miles
Monday’s run was the day after Christmas. The first two miles sucked. I mean, it was so bad I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make it through 5 miles. Mile 3 was tolerable, though, and the last two miles felt pretty decent. It was the greenway in Raleigh near my sister’s house, so at least it was pretty flat.
Wednesday’s run was in my parents’ neighborhood. I love my parents, but I don’t love running in their neighborhood. It didn’t help that at one point, I was running on a street with 4 lanes and a sidewalk, but it was trash pickup day, so I had to dodge trash cans on the sidewalk.
Wednesday night into Thursday morning, we got a bunch of rain. It stopped before my Thursday run, but the McMullen Creek and Four Mile Creek Greenways had some flooding. I had hoped to get 10 miles, but with all the detours around the flooding, I was lucky to get 8+ miles in.
Friday, I knew I needed a little over 6 miles to hit 1400 miles for 2016, and since it was going to be my last run of 2016 (I had planned on taking a rest day Saturday), I wanted to end it with .16 miles. So I had to run 6.16 miles. I hated stopping that short of a 10K. Guess I’ll have to wait until 2020 to fix that problem.
Sunday’s weather was pretty miserable. 41 degrees, overcast, and damp. Looking back at my previous New Year’s Day runs, 2014 and 2015 were colder (40 and 36) but both partly cloudy, so it probably warmed up a bit during each run. At least the rain held up for the most part, there was just a short period of drizzle and mist in the middle of my run. Also, I drove up to Freedom Park, but left my Garmin watch at home. D’oh! I still had Runkeeper on my phone, though.
I was hoping to get a few more miles, but between the weather, and the fact that my legs didn’t feel great, and (most importantly) the fact that I have a 10K race next Saturday, I didn’t want to push it. I still got to 4.17 for 2017.
Next week, I have the Joe Davis Run For Recovery 10K on Saturday. I’ve never done a shake-out run the day before a race, so I don’t want to run on Friday. That means that I need to take a day during the week, most likely Tuesday, and then I’ll need to run the day after the race on Sunday. Really, my goal for this week is to be ready for the race, so I’m going to try to take it easy in both mileage and pace. And I’m keeping an eye on the forecast for Saturday morning, which has been all over the place so far, but that’s what I get for signing up for a race in January.
Also, later this week, I’ll have a post about my goals for 2017.