Turning Point?

More Kara :) Great interview with Universal Sports talking about her upcoming World Championship prospects.

As detailed through previous entries, it's been no secret that this training cycle has been a rough experience thus far, and I have started to seriously question my motivation to run and why I was struggling so much through the early weeks of a new cycle. This week has been overall a battle, with small glimpses of success in some of my more recent runs. I ended up having a talk with my running mentor and coach Ken, and felt better after our discussion - I need to quit worrying so much about performance during workouts, and just run. If I was feeling it that day, then go for it but not put too much pressure on myself to kill workouts when I'm not feeling 100%. He was telling me about his recent training and how he too, was recently having bad weeks but then it suddenly clicked - he felt like he was 18 again, just mowing through the workouts. I hope that I am close to that point too...


Yesterday, I was scheduled for a 45 minute fartlek run, and ended up putting it off later and later because of various excuses. I was staying close to work because of picking up Shane and his brother at the airport (10 minutes away), and ended up going over to my friend Jim's apartment to hang out for the evening. The weather was pretty muggy and starting to get humid, so I decided to postpone my run until later and play some tennis. Two hours later of chasing balls around on the court, I was pretty wiped out - it is amazing how tiring tennis can be! Contemplated running after dinner and a small break, but the rain/hail started to hit so changed my mind of running an outdoor fartlek and relegated myself to treadmill running. As silly as this sounds, I changed my workout to running a tempo because I was too lazy to keep pushing buttons to change pace, so set a challenging goal of hitting 4 miles at sub 7 minute pace with a long warmup/cooldown. Started warmup at 7:30 pace, but amazingly felt great and just kept upping the pace until settling at 6:46 and beginning the actual tempo. I had the Cavs playoff game on the tv, and kept myself pretty distracted and just ran without much thought. Looked down at the screen to what I thought was maybe a couple miles into the workout, and was already 4.5 miles into my tempo so readjusted my workout and finished out. Hit about 7 miles total with warmup/cooldown, splits were: 6:46, 6:35, 6:35, 6:35, 6:35, 6:24. Legs felt unbelievable - I felt like I was putting in about 75% effort, and easily could have kept going for a few more miles. It was an amazing turnaround, and I am absolutely thrilled that I dominated this workout :)

This weekend, long run on Saturday, headed back to Peoria to see my family for Mother's Day, then pace run on Sunday. To all mothers out there, Happy Mother's Day!!!