Preppy Runner – Theodora Blanchfield

First of all – thank you for all of your comments on what you liked / wanted to see more of! There’s some stuff I’ll never feel comfortable blogging about (um, dating) but there were lots of great questions / ideas in the comments.

Christina from the Running Foodie! Please email me your address and I’ll get you a sparkly piece of elastic and a piece of plastic you can trade for coffee.

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Now onto the good stuff.

I’m glad to hear a lot of you like the training recaps. I know I like reading others’ training recaps because I like seeing how real people fit workouts and training into their weeks, and I enjoy writing the training recaps because it gives me time to reflect on an entire week of training instead of just an individual run. It’s also fun to look back on past weeks of training.

Like when I peaked at 47 miles per week last year. That was fun.

This week, I got a solid 30 miles in. Last week was my second week of building in this part of the training cycle. I’ll add some more mileage this week, take a step back again next week (I’m doing three weeks on, one week as a stepback) and then I’m pretty sure Jess will start piling on those miles. Bring it on.

P.S. Victoria had to go carry the friend leaderboard with that whole Ironman thing. Go over to her blog and congratulate her. I will forever be in awe of Ironpeople.

Monday: Rest day. A beautiful thing.

Tuesday: Did a 4-miler on the treadmill because it was pouring (and because it was another chance to watch Orange is the New Black) and Uplift with Jen for her birthday!

Wednesday: BEST TEMPO EVER. It was a 7-miler, and the tempo splits were 8:26, 8:31, 8:17. My half-marathon pace is 8:24, so I was happy with where those splits were. (And also wondered how I held that pace for 13.1 miles just a few months ago…) I also think that 7 miles is my new favorite mid-distance distance.

Thursday: Uplift. After the knee pain, I started adding in some more strength, and I’m happy to report that it’s helped the knee pain AND it’s not killing me like it was a few weeks ago.

Friday: Rest day

Saturday: AMAZING 14-miler with Rebecca! I did 14 miles at a 9:18 pace, which is more than a minute faster than my run the week before. This was the very first run since I started training where I thought breaking 4 might actually be possible. I felt like I was running instead of just slogging along AND I ran into my friend Emily at the end and then she made me breakfast.

Sunday: I spent Saturday evening recovering with all the wine and pizza at my buddy Courtney’s, so Sunday’s 5-mile run was sweating out wine and pizza. Sorry, West Side Highway. It was supposed to be 4 miles, but I knew that 5 would get me to 30 miles for the week, and I just wanted to hit 30.

I have so many questions for you today:

– Orange is the New Black: are you/did you watch? I rarely watch TV but really needed to step away from everything two weeks ago, turned it on and was hooked. It also gave me a ginormous dose of perspective in my life. Even when things are rough in my life, I’m still luckier than many.

– How do you recover from long runs? Wine and pizza, right? There must be some study somewhere funded by the Pizza Council of America to support this.

– How was your week o’training?

– Just a random question, but HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET RID OF MOSQUITO BITES IMMEDIATELY? I was eaten alive at said wine-and-pizza-recoveryfest, and my legs are a hot, mosquito-bite covered mess.

*Last week some people were confused by my countdown by weeks. My schedule has Marathon Week as “1 week to go”, so that’s where that comes from. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.