Change of pace

No, not THAT pace! (Not yet anyway.) I'm feeling really good about this month. Remember that second weekend in March (3/7-3/9) when I hadn't run or walked since 2/23, and I vowed to at least walk 10 miles that weekend? And I walked 12? I really turned it around this month.

Sure I walked a lot and my knee is still not 100%, but it's fine enough. Since I'm taking a break tomorrow from any running or walking distances, my monthly total is 65.67 miles, which amounts to more than half of my 2014 miles to date. And while that's great, what really excites me are the following changes I see:

Recovery
Usually when I ramp back up into running, I'm super sore and crampy. I'm not so much anymore, and I honestly believe a good part of this can be attributed to my strength training. I'm a bit sore tonight, for example, but I expect to feel fine in the morning.

Mindset
As you already know if you've been reading this blog long enough, I often beat myself up about not having run well, or having to stop and walk when I don't want to. Like today for my 3 mile run, I walked .10...then another .10 later, and finally a .07. This usually results in me berating myself, focusing on that .27 miles that I walked instead of 11/12 of the run that I managed to do. Not today. When those thoughts attempted to creep in I refused to accept them. "Dude...you ran 2.75 of a 3 mile run when at the beginning of the month your knee was hurting and this didn't seem possible." (Added note: and my time was 36:27, which means that my running was at a faster pace than 12:00 min/mi since ended up at 12:09 total, including the walking parts!)

Eating
I'm in a good place in making good choices most of the time. And when I indulge, I'm still tracking it (fitbit app), whether it's the occasional alcoholic beverage, some pizza or whatever. I track the "indulgences" (mostly on weekends only) along with everything else. What's awesome is that if I do miss my targeted calories (which includes a sizeable daily reduction), I find that I'm still under the total calories burned for the day. Related, my "on/off switch" is resetting. I went to grab seconds today on some food. Within minutes I knew it was time to stop. A month ago I probably would have cleaned that plate.

And I'm seeing that even with more activity this month, it still doesn't give me like this huge load of calories to play with. Good to know.
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So yeah...little by little things are changing. What a nice change of pace.



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