It’s time again.

I took my wonderful little hiatus from running to focus more on lifting and loved every minute of it. But reality called. And I have a race on August 18th. Of this year. A half marathon. And I haven’t run distance since the last one.

I should give myself 12 weeks to train, but I didn’t. I liked lifting so I wanted to wait to hop back on the running wagon. And I have now officially waited until the last possible moment.

It’s go time. So we go back to running.

I have my little training program up on the wall ready to be highlighted with every successful day finished. If I do all the runs properly, I’ll be totally confident and ready for this race in August. If I don’t, I will have a shit time during this race in August.

I want to do well at the race for three reasons:

1. It will be the first race I run as a 28-year-old (my birthday is 3 days before… you may begin wishing me happy birthday now).

2. It is the third in a series I’ve been running called the Triple Crown, so I will get an extra medal at the end of it and that will be awesome.

3. I’m competitive with myself. I always want to do better. So I want to beat my PR. The race is relatively easy compared to La Jolla. Then again, pretty much anything is easy compared to La Jolla. The elevation chart, though, shows that the majority of the race is downhill or flat, though the last miles is uphill. Not great, but manageable.  So the only thing I’ll be fighting is the “hotter” weather (which is the main complaint on yelp for this race). It’s hard to tell what “hot” weather is, though, because Southern Californians are pretty sensitive when it comes to weather changes so I don’t know if this will actually be “hot” or if it’s just Southern Californians being pansies. Having said that, I’m kind of a weather pansy so maybe I should listen to their complaints…

Anyway, I ran my first training run yesterday- three miles on a treadmill. I thought it was going to be a lot worse than it ended up being. My body missed running. It likes it. My mind likes the relaxation. I know what I’m doing when I’m going for a distance. I’ve done it before- it’s like I just fell right back into it.

And because I’ve loved lifting, I’m going to try and incorporate both. Yesterday, I ran my three miles and then I went upstairs and did my normal lifting. I didn’t get it all in because of a time crunch, but it felt really good to do both.

So I’m gonna be setting aside a serious chunk of time to get all this done at the gym every day. Which means I’ve got to be more protective of my mornings and my workout time. Which means I have to get better about waking up when I need to.

Which means I should probably go to bed.

Nighty night, pumpkins. Happy training.