Finding Balance

Jocelyn's blog reminded me guilted me that I have been lagging in my blog posts. I didn't even recap the Austin half marathon! Which, coincidentally, was the last time I felt above water in trying to do everything and doing everything well.

Let's summarize the mileage first.
WW07: 30.5 miles (included the Austin half)
WW08: 19 miles
WW09: 27.7 miles
WW10: 5.6 miles (got a stress cold, only ran 1x)
WW11: 32.1 miles
WW12: 42.4 miles

Trying to run high mileage during quarter end was probably not the greatest idea, but lesson learned for next quarter!

Next, summary of life events.

Austin half marathon ended up being a PR of nearly 20 seconds, which was really surprising. Jocelyn and I had been waiting for the porta potty at the start, so didn't cross the start line until about 3 or 4 minutes after the gun had gone off. Which means you have to wade through a lot lot of people before you can get your free running space. We ran (well zigzagged) together for the first few miles, before I left her on 1st Street heading north. Managed some 7 minute miles in the middle of the race and overall, a negative split. Aside from the late start, I was pretty happy with this. Definitely went a lot better than 3M - not sure if it was the added run fitness, the hilliness (flat does not make me faster),  my negative split "strategy," or a combination of everything. And then we went to brunch at Jack Allen's and got to hang out with Jocelyn's awesome friends Bliss & Minsok and drink lots of red wine. It was a good race Sunday.

Then work took over. And I got even more stressed. And decided that I no longer wanted to do long course triathlon this year. And that to prevent a meltdown, formal coaching was not in the plan for this year. I never thought I'd be the person giving up triathlon stuff because of work, but sometimes you just have cut your losses and figure out what will keep you sane. My old method of brute force, just try harder and you'll survive it, doesn't go as well when you're working 60+ hrs a week and in a relationship.

So then I signed up for the Rogue Trail Series 30k distance. Because just running (with a few swims and 1 bike workout per week) and Atomic is "way easier" than trying to train for 3 sports and be decent at all 3 sports at the same time. And then in talking to Coach Tod at Atomic, the plan became to ramp my mileage to ~50 mpw by the first trail series race.

So here I am, 2 weeks in. Somehow I managed to get in 40+ miles last week. I haven't done that since Jocelyn and I did the Graveyard 100k in 2013. I spent half the miles this week wanting to die, probably from both not sleeping enough (meetings that start at 7a and do not end until 10-11p cuts into good sleep and recovery) and the increased mileage.

Next week is the first race. I'm going to use it as a practice run since I haven't run real trails in awhile. Clearly I did not think this through when I signed up for the series, but there are 3 races to do and the first one just sort of crept up so I'll just train through this one and see how the rest go.