New Weekly Feature: Keep on Running

This blog is supposed to be about Queen, fashion/shopping, and running.

I've got the fashion/shopping part covered. Between my daily What I Wore posts, Anthropologie Fitting Room Reviews, Fashion Challenges, and Outfit Polls, I think a good 75% of my non-working/sleeping day is spent shopping, thinking about shopping, or writing about shopping.

The Queen part, I've been pretty good about too. I've stuck to my plan of highlighting a Queen Song of the Week every Friday, detailed meeting Dr. May, wished the boys birthday wishes, and occasionally ranted about various business decisions.

The running part?

Eh - not so much. Sure, I ran some posts called "Running Essentials" but running is a pretty straightforward sport. Once you have a couple of things, you're pretty much good to go. I have a few more that I can write, but that's not enough to properly feature the third component of my blog.

I've also been slagging off a bit in my training. This summer has been the most hot and humid that I can ever remember. The temperature hasn't dipped below 70 degrees (nights included) in weeks and the humidity is frequently about 75%. In the winter, my treadmill is a viable option, but in the summer, it's a recipe for heat stroke: there's no air conditioning in that room and no matter how many fans I set up, I cannot generate enough air circulation to make me not want to die.

This is a bit of a problem, however, since my fellow princesses have convinced me to run my fourth half marathon in October.

Hence, my new weekly feature "Keep on Running", loosely based on Designer Me's Monday Training Posts (click here) and named after a song originally by the Spencer Davis Group that Roger Taylor recorded (and didn't release) during his 1984 Strange Frontier sessions.


Basically I'm going to post my half marathon training plan every week and then I'll say which workouts I successfully completed. If I have a good week and follow the training plan, you will all congratulate me and I'll be happy. If I have a bad week and slag off, you will all yell at me and I'll be publicly embarrassed.

See? Fun for everyone!

To generate my workouts, I use the SmartCoach training program on the Runners World website. You have to be a member of Runners World to use SmartCoach, but membership is free. I plugged in my recent 10K time of 1:05:00, selected a 10 week training program, that I typically run 15-20 miles a week, and that I wanted a moderately hard program.

I'm also going to try to work in yoga at least twice a week. Occasionally, I'll combine shorter runs (like the 2 milers this week) into one longer run.

Now, here comes the fun part: did I stick to my workout schedule for Week 1?

Sunday:          Yoga
Monday:         2 mile easy run
Wednesday:    5 mile tempo run
Thursday:       Yoga
Friday:            2 mile easy run
Saturday:        7 mile long run

What this week has taught me is that not running in the hot/humid weather makes running much more difficult that a tough run in hot/humid weather. Typically your pace slows in the summer, but when you combine that with basically being lazy for an entire month, your pace ends up essentially a crawl. The best thing I can say about my runs this week is that I got through them.

I will say this though: already this feature is having an impact on my training. At about 3 miles in today, I really really wanted to call Husband and make him come get me, but then I thought to myself, "Geesh - I can't run the silly feature for the first time and not have completely made it through all the runs," so I sucked it up and got through 4 more miles. Hopefully this shame will carry me through the next nine weeks until the Diva Half Marathon.

So Week 1 of my Half Marathon Training Program was a success. You can now commence the obligatory congratulatory comments!

I'm off to the Red Sox game now. I'll be back tomorrow with the wrap-up and final outfit in my 18 for 18 Challenge.

Happy Running!

And GO Red Sox!