Training Summary: 2/2 - 2/8

Mon: 0
Tue: 5 miles
Wed: 7 miles, including fartlek
Thu: 0
Fri: 6 miles
Sat: 5 miles
Sun: 3 miles
Total: 26 miles

Between how busy I am at work, being terribly out-of-shape, not being 100% healthy, and most days having to run in cold, dark conditions, my motivation is at an all-time low. As a result, I wind up with weeks like this, which obviously isn’t going to cut it if I ever want to compete again. That’s really what I’m debating at this point. Do I want to put forth the effort and make the commitment it will take to get race fit, or am I content to hang up the racing flats and just run occasionally for fitness? I will say this much. I won’t continue to do what I’ve done over the past couple months for much longer. I’m running too much and too hard for it to be fun, but at the same time I’m not doing enough volume or quality to run fast. The end result is most of my runs feel labored yet they don’t really do anything to get me in shape.  I’m in no man’s land, so to speak.

I did attempt a little faster running this week on Wednesday, and it was probably one of, if not the, worst workouts of my life. I did a fartlek consisting of 2/1/2/1/2/1 min on with 2 min recoveries. I wasn’t running all out by any means, but it did NOT feel easy, and I refuse to say what my average pace was because it would be flat out embarrassing. It was a slap in the face that made me want to double down and start training as hard as possible, but going back to the aforementioned low motivation, obviously it wasn’t enough of a jolt because I wound up taking the next day off. That’s sort of the pattern for me right now. I’ll have a bad run that makes me mad and gets me all fired up to get back to training, but that feeling only lasts a short period of time and then I’m right back to not caring.

Anyway, my current plan is to try to at least tread water until the middle of this year when things should slow down at work. After that I feel like I’ll be able to make a more fair, unbiased decision about whether or not I want to continue training hard enough to compete or just become a fitness runner (which there’s nothing wrong with). The only problem with that is June is still almost four months away, which is a long time to flounder around like I have the past two months, so hopefully I can get things together at least a little better than I have recently. Otherwise, it’s gonna be a long time to summer!