What a better time than mid February to do a recap of my January Training LOL. I promise to be more timely on this in the future. I have been busy with trying to keep up with my other social sites.. Instagram and Twitter.  Anyway, after coming off a year of running over 2100 miles with 3 full marathons sprinkled in, my December was a light month to give me time to recover.

For January I ended up logging 164 miles.  I typically run 6 days per week with one day off from running. In the past I would truly take that one day off and not do any sort of activity at all.  However I was involved in a step challenge for January and so I was always doing something on my ‘off’ days to keep up. And I’ve carried over that habit into February- interesting how behavior changes in a challenge.

My weeks tend to have 2 speed work type runs and then the rest are ‘easy’ runs. Easy runs should be most of your weekly running and should be 1-2 minutes slower than race pace. I never used to believe that until I started working with a coach.  I love my easy run days. I don’t have to stress about intervals or any of that.. I just run.

Some of my speed work days were mile repeats.  I had 3 training days where I did 4 x 1 mile repeats, 5 x1 mile repeats, and then 3 x 2mile repeats. I love MILE repeats.  Because then you always get a short recovery. When you do more than 1 mile in a repeat it becomes tough!  But remember tough means stepping out of the comfort zone and growing.  The other 2 speedwork days were ladder workouts.  Those are tough but you start off at the top and go down- it makes the run go pretty fast!  My other ‘speedwork’ days were some long runs with fast finishes.   My long runs tend to be on Saturday unless I can’t fit them in and then I’ll swap Sunday and Saturday and make it work.  For my long runs in January I had 11 miles, 10 miles, 12 mile, and 9 miles.  Just prepping for my Run Disney Races in mid to late February.

To wrap this up I spent most of the month inside running on my treadmill during the week. I have to run early before work (between 5-6am and it’s dark, and cold) and I’ve become quite the scaredy-cat cat to run outside alone anymore as I get older.  I put my treadmill on an incline from 1-2.5% to mimic outside. I put it up to 2-2.5% on most of my easy runs.  By the time the weekend gets here I am itching to get outside.  Thankfully we have had pretty mild weather for January, as compared to other winters. Though one day I ran outside in monsoon like conditions😩.  I just couldn’t bear to run inside another day!

As always, if you are still reading to the end, thanks for stopping by and listening 🙂

Below are some of my photos from my January runs!