Another week of trail marathon training is in the books! I’m loving trail running, but I swear, it feels like an entirely different sport. I feel like I’m training for my first marathon again: every week, I finish a long run and think, “Can I really run another 11, 9, whatever, miles?” I’m enjoying it, though. It’s fun to be learning and trying something new!

Here’s how this week looked:

Monday: 

AM: 9.3 miles: 2-mile warm–up,4×1-mile at threshold pace with 3-minute rests, and 2-mile cool down. I haven’t really done speedwork this training cycle — my hard workouts have all been hills — so this was TOUGH. But the sunrise was pretty.

PM: 45ish minuts strength training

Tuesday: 

AM: 10.6 easy-paced miles. This was an inservice day, so I didn’t have to be at work as early as I do on school days, and I really enjoyed my last morning-with-daylight weekday run for a while.

PM: 30 minutes of yoga, mostly because my colleague and I talked about yoga that day, and I felt guilty for not having done it for a while. Increasing mileage + not doing yoga + two days of sitting in meetings = very angry hips and hamstrings.

Wednesday: 

7-mile recovery run with Jaylin

Thursday: 

5.2 miles of treadmill hills.I had planned for around 7 miles, but my body didn’t adjust well to the half-hour earlier alarm and I was just dragging. This was the first day with students, so I wanted to be early and just cut it short. It  was still a good workout. I also skipped my planned afternoon strength workout. I’m not sure why I bothered planning one at all — I should know by now that the first day of school is always exhausting!

Friday: 

5.5-mile recovery run

Saturday: 

Although I really didn’t want to get up early again, I knew I needed to get to the trails to train. Of course, once i was there,  I was glad I went. I tried a different trailhead and got to run parts of the race course that I hadn’t been on before, so that was fun.  I ran 17 miles, my longest trail run yet.

I was really just trying to take a picture of these deer, not the cyclist. But that cyclist (and his two buddies) and I played leapfrog for a good chunk of my run. 
No race can suck too much if you’re looking at this, right?

Sunday:

Rest day. I took a walk and did some yoga to work out some soreness from Saturday.

Total: 54.6 miles

Since the weather is supposed to be hot for at least another week, I’m sticking with morning runs, but I have to start either in the dark or on the treadmill, so I’m hoping I can switch to evenings soon. And on that note, I’m going to post this and get ready for bed so I don’t have another sluggish morning like Thursday.

Are you training for anything lately? 

Is it starting to cool down where you live? 

P.S. Don’t forget to enter my Freekeh Foods giveaway!