Thursday, April 18, 2019

Q2 Goal Check-In

I set a bunch of goals for myself, including some that I didn't really write about here before.

I've been working to run a full year (I'm on Day #148 of my streak from Thanksgiving) and beyond that, I'm aiming to run 2,019 miles in 2019.  The volume has been incredible, so far, and I don't feel weaker or broken down 600 or so miles into the challenge. I'm planning to run smarter over the next few months -- slower runs for bulk, to maintain some quality in the workouts.

I've also signed up for a challenge on Strava, which is unlike other challenges on there. The goal is to run the last mile of a half/full marathon as the fastest mile. I've never really tried consciously to do that, so I'm going to give it a go at Angry Unicorn on May 5. That is currently my half marathon PR, and I think partially because the course has some rolling hills, so it has an element of challenge to it. I'm hopeful that the difficult nature of the course, combined with my past experience there will give me an added bonus. I'm also going to toss in a couple of speed work workouts over the next 20 days or so, so maybe that will give me an edge.

Fatherhood-wise, all is going well. The baby is almost one year old! She is working on learning 'hi' and babbles (with quite a bit of speech patterns) at us constantly. The 3-year-old is a lot of fun, and very creative. She hates to sleep. But, she loves to run and we have gone on a couple of hikes which have been a lot of fun. I'm hoping to go for a trail run on Father's Day, and I would like her to join me for the last little bit of it. She likes running through the woods, so I don't think it's a hard sell. But, she's probably only going to be up for a quarter to a half mile. Hey, you've got to start somewhere?

Brand new race calendar up on the side. Sadly, looks like no Run with the Beavers this year, which was also one of my favorite events of the year on technical trails in George Washington Management Area. In lieu of that, I'm hoping to get out and run several segments of RI's North-South Trail. I love that trail, and one of these years I've love to run some big sections of it, if not all of it.

There's also a 25k relay being run by one of my local race organizations, and some friends and I may try to put a group together for that. I've never run a relay before, but it could be a fun change of pace.