I can’t believe it’s September already! This is the month half marathon training starts! Eeeeek!

On Tuesday, I went out to the park to do speed intervals. It had been a rough couple of days, so I really needed to relieve some stress. My plan had me do 13 iterations of 1 minute fast running, 1 minute slow. I did well, although possibly not as well as last week’s intervals, though this week there were more of them and the walk breaks were shorter, so that was to be expected. My fastest interval was the last one at an 8:25 min/mile. Yay! Also, can I just say that running is pretty much the best stress reliever there is? My dad has been having some health issues and I’d been super worried about him and my mom (who is dealing with a lot right now) and this run really helped me calm down.

My next run was scheduled for Thursday. I planned to go out after work, but when I checked the weather, I saw the heat index was over 100. Ha! No thanks. So Jonathan and I finished off the second season of “Game of Thrones” instead. I didn’t want a repeat of last week where I let TV watching derail me, so I decided to hit the treadmill. Yes, it was 10:30 at night. But I got my run in! I did three miles without walking. First time since before my injury! I put the treadmill on a 1.5% incline to compensate for lack of wind resistance. There’s some debate over whether this is really necessary, but I find that running on a 0% incline is way easier than running outdoors. Here’s a handy chart to figure out equivalent pacing. I ran the first half mile on 4.5 mph to warm up, the next on 5.0, the next on 5.5, and the next on 6.0. For the last mile, I varied it a bit, slowing down and running on a more intense incline (8%) for a minute or two, and speeding back up to 6.0 and even 7.0 for a minute at a time. It made me feel confident that I could run the 1.88 mile sections of the upcoming relay without walking if I paced myself properly!

I had a wedding to shoot on Saturday, so my last run of the week was on Sunday. It was supposed to be 50 minutes, but I decided to just round it out and do a full hour. My main goal was to run 2 miles without walking without being on a treadmill. This didn’t happen. While the weather wasn’t bad and I paced myself okay, the toll of being on my feet for nearly ten hours the day before wrecked havoc on my legs. I made it 1.25 miles before walking. By the end of the hour (and five miles), my legs felt like they might fall off. The day only went downhill from there, so perhaps I should have saved my run for the end of the day instead of the beginning.

The marathon relay is this Saturday, so hopefully it will go well!

After a rest day on Monday and a doctor’s visit on Tuesday morning, my first run of the week was Tuesday evening. Since last week I decided that I might repeat weeks 6-8 of Couch to 5k, I repeated week 6, day 1: run 5 minutes, walk 3 minutes, run 8 minutes, walk 3 minutes, run 5 minutes. I did it and rocked it, with my final 5 minute run averaging an 11 min/mile.

I didn’t plan to run on Wednesday but the weather was so nice that I couldn’t help but run a mile. And I ran the whole mile! That makes it my first completely run mile since I started training again, and I did it in 11 minutes. Yay!

The next morning I got up bright and early to run in the sub-60 degree temps (!!). I decided to abandon my Couch to 5k plan and switched over to Runkeeper’s Beginning 5k plan. That morning it had me do a speed workout: 10 intervals of one minute fast running followed by 90 seconds of walking. Except I thought that there were only eight intervals, so I kind of went all out on what I thought was the last one, running at around an 8:30 min/mile pace. I made it through the last two after that closer to a 10 min/mile pace.

My plan said that Saturday I was supposed to do a 2 mile run, but I’m trying to get in the habit of doing long runs on weekends, so I went a little further. My main goal was to try to run 1.25 miles without walking, but I fell a little short of that, getting to 1.1 before I had to walk. I’d blame the weather (it was supposed to be 67, overcast, and possibly raining…instead it was 75 and sunny), but my legs just felt like jelly. It was hard to get any momentum after that, so I did some run-walk intervals to a 5k distance before stopping.

Monday I went out for a short jaunt. My main goal was to run at a sustainable pace for as long as I could, just to see exactly how bad my fitness level had gotten in my four week hiatus. Ugh, it was bad. Half a mile was all I could take without walking, which is a far cry from the three miles I was at before. (Granted, it was humid, but still.) My legs could take more, but not my lungs (so maybe it wasn’t a sustainable pace then, but I can’t go much slower).

On Wednesday, I decided it might be fun to run with a group, so I went to run with the East Nasty Running Club. Specifically, I went because their Potato to Tomato (Couch to 5k) group was joining them that night, so I figured I would at least be able to join in with them. They separated themselves into a number of subgroups from fastest to slowest. I wasn’t sure if they would be doing different run/walk ratios or different pacing or what. Figuring these people had only been running for eight weeks, I picked something in the middle, which turned out to be group 5. We did a quick walk warmup, then a 30 second run interval. “This isn’t too bad,” I thought to myself. “Maybe I should have gone to a faster group.” Nope. After that one interval, they started running around a 10 min/mile pace and didn’t stop. I tried to keep up, but after three quarters of a mile, I had to walk. That was way too fast for me right now. So group 5 passed me. Then group 6 passed me. Eventually I was just running solo, with groups ahead of me and after me. I’d stop to walk for a bit and the groups behind me would catch up, then I’d run and catch up with the group ahead of me. So much for actually running with a group. I’ll try that again when I can actually run.

Also, we were running a slightly modified version of the Tomato 5k route. The only thing I really learned is that I never want to run the Tomato 5k. My friend Laura had warned me the day before that it was practically all uphill. I laughed and said, “It’s a loop. How can it be all uphill? At least half of it has to be downhill.” I have no idea, but the thing was nearly all uphill. It was like some M. C. Escher route. You’d run up a hill, hit a level spot, turn a corner, and then continue uphill. For. Ever. I don’t even understand the elevation map for it, which shows the route as fairly level with a few mild rolling hills. Lies. I’m tempted to go back and run it in reverse to see what happens, but I’m sure it would continue to defy physics and be completely uphill that way too. And these are the first hills I’ve “ran” since I started back. That, coupled with the awful heat and humidity, meant this 3.1 miles were slow going. I finished in a little over 40 minutes, which is the slowest 5k time I’ve had since April. But the good news? My hip flexors didn’t hurt at all. Nor was I in pain the next day. Yay!

Friday’s run went much better. I got stuck in horrible traffic on my way home from work, so by the time I got there and changed into my running clothes, it was about 20 minutes before sunset. I set Nike+ to tell me when two miles was up, but I was running a loop that I knew was around two miles, so I don’t really know why I did that. Anyway, I ran as long as I could without walking, which turned out to be about 0.65 miles, so that’s an improvement over Monday’s run (about one minute longer). Slow and steady! I did a few quick intervals before I hit the one big hill on the route. I tried running up it, but ended up walking most of it. I did a couple longer run intervals toward the end, including one 3 minute run interval around a 10 min/mile pace, which made me happy that I still had the energy for that. And look how well I did with my pacing compared with last week!

I decided to something a little different on Sunday. Since I feel like I’ve regressed so much since I got injured, I made an interval workout called “Catchup to 5k”. It basically consisted of a summary of weeks 2-5 of Couch to 5k (which you can see below). I used RunKeeper to audibly tell me what interval I was supposed to be on, and it also recorded my times per interval. “Steady” is my running intervals and “Slow” is walking. I find it kind of funny that I run faster on my 3-5 minute intervals than on my 1.5 minute ones.

I made it total around an hour, which I knocked out 4.5 miles in. It started raining towards the end, which felt fantastic. Overall, I never felt really winded on the running bits, so that’s good. I never walked when I wasn’t supposed to, and, in fact, I ran a couple times on my walking parts (mainly if there was a downhill…just let gravity do its job!). The best part of the whole run? One of my five minute runs landed on the Hill That Shall Not Be Run (17% grade at its steepest), and I ran up the whole thing. First time ever.

Since I handled weeks 2-5 without dying, I’ll probably start back on Couch to 10k around week 6. And just go as far as I can on it until I start half marathon training next month.