Four Miles a Week

Aside from races, I have been running about 4 miles a week for the past few months, sometimes more... sometimes less. =O

My Garmin has been collecting dust, in favor of my heart-rate monitor.  On these 4-mile runs (they are familiar, so I don't need GPS), I run slow yet reach heart rates up to 188 BPM, with 175 being about average.  Clearly, I am out of shape?

By the lack of mention of running on this blog, maybe that's not surprising, though it surprises me.

This past week, I ran 4.5+5 miles... that's almost ten.  "The Ukrainian" took me on that five-r, and the 4.5 came out of the blue when I had to deal with something pretty unpleasant.  I haven't had one of those runs in quite some time.

And a couple of weeks ago, I bought running shoes for the first time in a YEAR (another Saucony Stabil CS2).  Although not intentional, I'm happy I waited, as I scored a deal on Amazon and was able to actually get a color besides blue in the wide-width.  =)

I'm planning on running LA Marathon in March (for the sixth time!) and hope to train more than I have in the past -- but I will somehow need to strike a balance between not training and putting in the long miles, burning out, and blowing it.

At the moment, I have no real training plan, just a goal to "run more often."  After things calm down around here a bit (within the next few weeks?), I will aim for 3-4 days a week, one of those being a "longer" run.  I don't think I'll be running with a GPS and worrying about my pace until 2013... but I will stick to heart-rate monitoring to see if it starts lowering after a while.