Feels Like Training Again

It's official! In addition to the 10K, I'm officially also training for the Bellingham Bay Half Marathon on September 28!

My training plan is following the half marathon, and I'm just kind of shoving the 10K race in there. It's in less than a month! Man, time really is flying.

Friday morning started off with a really perfect training run - 4 miles in the hills, all negative splits, with my friend Chelsey.

No pictures of us because I figured we looked like death at 5:15 in the morning.

I wanted to wake up early this morning to tackle my farthest distance in this training cycle yet: 9 Miles. I hadn't run that close to 10 miles in.. what feels like forever, and I just wanted to get it over with this morning, meaning around 6 or 7am. Well, I didn't get out of bed until about 7:45 (naturally), and didn't get to my destination until about 8, starting my run around 8:15am.

Another deer sighting! There were two, but I could only catch this one.

I tried out a new trail - the East Lake Sammamish Trail. This trail connects to Marymoor Connector, which is what I start on mostly, but I go the other way, towards the Sammamish River Trail. Sometimes I'd go towards the East Lake Sammamish Trail, but would only get a little ways before I turned around back to Marymoor.

I tried to go to this trail when I ran 7 Miles on Wednesday, but was thwarted by no free parking. Well this time, I figured it out! I just parked at the McDonalds across the street, and it turns out that tons of other runners/bikers do that as well.

The run was pretty good, but I was feeling kind of tired. I ate two prunes with peanut butter in the middle as my fuel around Mile 3- first time I've done that! It was pretty good, just kind of messy.

I'm doing really well with keeping my last mile my fastest, but man this was a mentally tough run. I stopped at Mile 1.5 to take a picture of the deer, and thought I was going to stop at the halfway point, but I made myself push through. I'm happy that there's so much green in my paces!

I feel like I've gotten slower though? I keep looking at my Seattle Half Marathon paces, all in the 8s, and wonder how the hell I did that. How did I get so fast? And I seemed to have gotten super fast by accident, too. So many of my posts are like "I was tired, but I still ran super fast!" without any kind of effort. Was it because I was training for the marathon, and was just ecstatic that I wasn't running 15+ miles? Hmm.

After my run, JW and I got brunch at Issaquah Cafe, which was DELICIOUS.

The pancakes are JW's (pumpkin! jealous!), but mine was the "Potato Burrito" and it was GLORIOUS. "Scrambled eggs, baby reds, ground sausage, Tillamook cheddar, diced tomatoes and green onion wrapped in a flour tortilla, drizzled with avocado cream sauce" With a side of fruit. YUMMM. JW also got the Eggs Benedict, which were delicious.

With a long, early run on Saturday, plus delicious brunch, plus officially registering for the half, it really does feel like I'm back in the thick of traditional training again. Woohoo!