There wasn’t anything really special about training this week. This was a step-back week, and I hit my targets for both the tempo and strength workouts.  The interesting runs came this weekend.

Yesterday my family rant the Ellie Helton Memorial 5k (recap forthcoming). It was a great time and a good cause, but forced me to break the scheduled ten mile run into three chunks (3, 4, 3) with long breaks in between. I couldn’t have asked for better weather or company, but breaking up the runs created stiffness I didn’t anticipate.

Today my plan called for another ten and I headed out to the American Tobacco Trail. Unfortunately, when I got there and went to press start on my Garmin watch I realized I left it at home and didn’t have an app on my phone to track runs. Sigh. The trail is marked every 0.25 miles, though, so between that and a stopwatch feature on my regular watch I could roughly track my pace on the run. I hadn’t had to do that in a long time, but it reminded me of high school and college when I either had to drive a course first or guess how long I ran. I couldn’t get lost in the run, but doing basic math certainly provided a distraction.

In other news, the warm-up half I had planned to run was officially cancelled which makes sense given that Kinston is facing the worst flooding since Hurricane Floyd. Missing a race is really minor in comparison to what folks in that area are going through.

So next Saturday is now an open date again, and I have two races under consideration. One is a ten miler at the Tobacco Trail that I could use this as my tempo run for the week, but it’s on a trail I run all the time so it’s not that exciting. The other race is a trail race at a state park I have not run at before, but because it’s on trails it would be for fun and not give me any race prep. Decisions, decisions.

This week is also the last long run for my training cycle. Richmond is getting closer, and my nerves are growing. I am trying to do some mindfulness exercises to address that, and soon I need to start visualizations for race day.