Make Your Blog Awesome AND The Workout I Hate

Hi! While I despise the phrase “In Case You Missed It” with the fire of a thousand suns (it reminds me of my days as a writer at a political trade magazine where I would get all-caps subject lines of IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: CANDIDATE SHAKES GRANDMAS’ HANDS IN SMALLEST TOWN EVER or equally inane things), I did want to give a little shout-out over here to my own side project.

I want to help you make your blog awesome! As a social media professional and blogging dork, I’ve served as an informal consultant to my blogger friends for quite some time, and after getting lots of inquiries lately, I decided to make it formal.

So, if you want to make your blog awesome, click on over to makeyourblogawesome.com. (I’m actually really surprised that domain wasn’t taken.) I probably won’t talk about that much on here, but I will be putting up a nice button in my sidebar so you can easily find this again if you’d like to. I’ve always considered my Twitter part professional/part blog/part dumb stuff I say/part dog pictures, so if you do want to learn more social media stuff for free and you’re not already following me…do so.

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On to the running stuff!

The first week of marathon training is always fun for me. It’s all shiny and new, and I’m excited. I usually find the next month pretty boring as it’s a lot of base building, and your long runs don’t yet feel like they’re marathon-training runs. They’re just long. But because I want so badly to do sub-4 this year, Jess is whipping me into shape early with longer runs, higher mileage and speedwork earlier.

She also has more faith in me than I do myself, so this week, she’s been trying to not assign paces, because she thinks that I can run faster than I think I can. Monday’s run was a 4-mile easy run with strides at the end, but today’s run was …

I don’t know why they scare me so much, but they do. I’d never actually done them before today. I was supposed to do them just before the D.C. Half. Oops! They just so happened to not happen. I was supposed to do them yesterday, and I ended up not running at all because I didn’t want to/was scared to do them. (I realize that now. Yesterday, I just made excuses. Fail.)

If you’re not familiar with mile repeats, you typically warm up for a mile or two, and then run a mile at a pretty balls-to-the-wall pace, recover for a bit and then repeat. According to this Runner’s World article, you get the same benefits of a tempo but with less fatigue because of the recovery.

Sweet.

On my specific plan was: 1.5 mile warmup, 3 mile repeats with 3-minute recovery and a mile cooldown.

FINE, JESS, I’LL DO IT.

I motivated myself by putting on one of my favorite shoes – the speedy AND gorgeous New Balance 1600s.

Of course, I waited until I basically couldn’t wait any more to go tonight and left around 7. I hoped that would mean at least it’d be cooler, but not much. I shuffled over to the West Side (my warmups have been really slow lately), ran an extra half-mile…and…go time.

I took off for that first mile and tried so hard not to look at my watch.

7:26

WOO REST INTERVAL.

Every day I’m shufflin’…

Oh, another one of these?

I ran another half mile and then turned around so I could get home without having to walk too much.

8:02.

OMG REST INTERVAL, I LOVE YOU.

Crap, ANOTHER ONE? Okay, it’s the last one.

7:52.

The last one was really hard. I struggled the entire time to get even a decent breath in. My legs were exhausted. At around .6 miles, I thought, “eh, I can just stop here.”

But that wouldn’t make me any stronger, right?

What workout do you hate?