This Week in Running – Go to a Happy Place

Good morning and Happy Friday! Something is seriously wrong with me. My family is out of town and I don’t have work today, yet I woke up just before 5am, felt pretty rested and couldn’t go back to sleep. Bleh. The title of this week’s post is from one of my favorite movies and is also a solid mantra.

Happy learned how to putt.

If I can’t sleep, I might as well write and listen to some bluegrass covers. I found a Spotify station of Bluegrass songs that many of you would actually know, like current song, a Bluegrass version of Hot in Herre by Nelly (profanity alert). You never know what the next song will be and it’s pretty fun.

My week in running has me at a bit of a crossroads. I’ve had days where I feel great and am hungry for more. I started thinking about late fall/early winter marathons and training plans. What??? Yeah. I started thinking about getting back to the track and running some top speed intervals. Sounds fun, right?

Definitely in a happy place here. Never leave.

I’ve also had days that remind me of the 4 months that I couldn’t put in a single mile. I push hard on hot mornings only to look down at my watch and hope that the pace shown isn’t right (it is). I’ve had runs where I start out with my normal drive and enthusiasm, only to end up needing a walk break.

All of these runs do have one thing in common. I’m happy to be running at all. Losing something can certainly help you appreciate it, so I’m finding joy in every mile. I even ran trails this week! I plan on getting back to those. They are beautiful, usually hilly (which I need), lower impact than the road and work a few extra muscles. It’s like cross-training, but not.

4.5 trail miles and I’m a mountain man, wrastlin bears and whatnot.

Last week was 23.8 miles. This week will be about the same. A 10 mile long run is in my future. I might go for it on Sunday or I might not. No pressure. No pressure…someone should start a running group where there’s no pressure and people can run how and what they please. They could call it the No Pressure Running Group! That would never work.

One other tidbit of awesomeness…I found new pairs of my favorite shoe ever! Altra made a shoe called “The One” a while back and I ran in the first version and loved them. Eventually they got to version 2.5 and I consider them the perfect shoe. I ran lots of miles and lots of races (including some PRs) before I finally had to retire them the day I ran my fastest half marathon ever. No, I didn’t bury them or cry.

Of COURSE, the reviews of version 3 were not favorable. As we all know, shoe companies LOVE to make “improvements” to our favorite shoes. Luckily, I scored some 2.5s!

Baby, you’re the one. We’re gonna run so fast.

That’s it for this week. I’m heading out to have coffee with running buddies (maybe buddy?) but I’m skipping the run. Today feels like more of a cross-training day.

How’s everybody else’s week been? Anybody have an old version of running shoe that they search the globe for?