Weekly Recap: Easing back into running….

What a beautiful week it was in Minneapolis. The weather was so wonderful and everyone seemed to be in such great moods! It’s amazing what a difference a little sunshine can make.

Monday: My first “workout” of Grandma’s training, but it was a short one to ease me back into moving my legs faster again: 4 minutes at a 7:50 pace with 1 minute off, 6 times, with a mile to warmup and a mile to cool down. 5.5 miles total.

C2 yoga class in the evening at Corepower; the instructor was Nielle. Have any of you taken Nielle’s class? It’s a bit more spiritual than some of the other more physical vinyasa classes at Corepower, but I really liked it. It was just what I needed.

Tuesday: 4 miles easy with Matilda

Wednesday: 6.3 miles at “quicker” pace with my friend Kelly

Thursday: 6 miles easy after work. I changed things up and ran on Minnehaha parkway on my way home from work. It was a nice change of scenery from the lakes and running after work finally gave me an opportunity to run in the sunshine (and shorts!)

Friday:  C2 yoga class at Corepower with instructor Matt. I also had a “tune-up” appointment at Orthology to work on my IT band tightness. It was a great appointment and I’ll share more about it later this week.

Saturday: 11 miles with the CBRC; I ran most of this with my friend who just did the Phoenix Marathon; she’s also running Grandma’s so the two of us are building back up from our recent marathons, vs. a lot of the other Grandma’s runners who had a lot more mileage yesterday. 

Sunday: 1 hour barre class at the barre and then an easy 4  mile run with Matilda. Dustin joined us and then went on to add more miles- he’s training for a 50k in Colorado in early May. Since he’s not doing Grandma’s marathon with me, he decided to dip his toes into the “ultra” world with a 50k trail race (50k is about 30 miles).

Summary: 35 miles, 2 yoga classes, 1 barre class. So my goal was to do 1 yoga class and 1 strength class each week- I did it this week! In fact, I was an overachiever with TWO yoga classes. I think I have more motivation to do more after work when the sun is still out. The days already feel so much longer and the temptation to “hibernate” is gone.

The more I hear and read about Grandma’s marathon, the more excited I get! I hope it lives up to the hype. It is still almost 4 months away, so I’m going to be careful to ease back into my training. I have an 8k race next Sunday (the Irish Run 8k in St. Paul) but I’m not sure if my legs will be ready to race or not. I’m going to see how things feel this week and make my decision closer to race day.

Matilda wants you to know that she is also loving this warm weather. She can’t get enough of the outdoors and loves all the exciting new smells now that the snow is gone! The only problem is that she gets pretty muddy during runs, so there’s a whole lot more baths going on. No complaining here; I’ll take some mud if it means that spring has arrived!