Building again

So Saturday we ran 15 miles.  It's that time again.  It's time to build to peak week.  I don't know what it is about spring training but I am struggling to want to do long runs.  I think it may be the weather.  During the summer months, the weather is so predictable: hot.  We never have to decide when we're going to run: early. You have to or you die.

Anyway, we got out the door about 7:00.  I knew we would be dealing with the wind a little bit and it was kind of cold.  We added two miles to the front end of our previous week's route.  That kind of played with my head a little bit because we were two miles farther into our run than we usually are.  For some reason I seem to be struggling to just find a rhythm.  We decided to add the surges that we did last fall to try to build some speed into these long runs.  I really can't say that at any point early on in our run it felt good.

About seven miles into our run we git the good hill, the one that is just steep enough and long enough to be brutal.  Last year when we'd run this hill, our go-to song was "Fight Song" by Rachel Platten.  This year it's "My House" by Flo Rida.  It's nearly perfect in length.  We start it at the bottom and are nearly at the top when it's over.  During this song, I focus on the beat, on just putting one foot in front of the other.  It just gets me to the top.  After we crested the hill, I finally started to feel like I'd hit my stride.  We fueled shortly after this hill.

We have a decently long decent after these rolling hills and that felt good.  I'm not going to lie.  Our last two-ish miles were kind of tough and we ended up being just a little long but we felt like our time was pretty good.  I had some tightness in my hips afterward but I moved around a lot that day and it seemed to subside.

Thanks for checking in with me.  I hope you are moving forward in your goals.  Let me know if you have questions or comments.  Best of luck in whatever you're pursuing.