Wait, it's still summer, right?

What is UP with the weather here? The last two days have been "freezing"!! Ok, not freezing but a high of 72, rainy, damp, and dark is NOT my idea of August 24th weather.  The wind was shaking the whole house this morning (you should know that I have a very tiny, very old house that rattles easily) which meant that running around Maritime would have been nearly impossible with Thomas in the jogger. So, I decided to run up the avenue.  It's not bad but I'm not crazy about the extra traffic involved.  I turn my iPod down pretty low because I'm afraid of not hearing everything.  Yes, I realize I could just turn off the music but I'm not one to run with just my thoughts - I'm crazy enough, I don't need any extra time to think! ;)

I think I need to stick closer to a real half marathon training plan.  I've read about so many and it seems that the Hal Higdon Novice Plan comes highly recommended.  According to his plan, the long runs are scheduled for Sundays but I think my long runs will either be Friday or Saturday mornings.  The plan calls for days of "Stretch and Strengthen" and Cross-training.  I'll need to figure out what to do for those days.  I mean, I'm training to run a half marathon - shouldn't I be running? I have an elliptical machine that I suppose I could dust off and hop on.

Onto today's run:
According to the schedule, I should have run 2 miles or cross-train. Well, I didn't figure out what day was what on the plan (since I'm moving the long run up one day) so I thought I needed to do 3 miles. Here's what I did today:


When I was about half way through I saw my aunt's sister who lives up that way and stopped to chit chat with her for about 3 minutes.  I stopped my timer and restarted it once I got running again.  I ran the 3 miles in 35 min-ish. Not bad. I felt pretty ok. But most importantly, I'm glad it's over!

I'm still waiting for that time when running 3 miles will be easy.  I'm trying not to get too far ahead of myself and start worrying about the fact that if 3 miles is hard, 13.1 is going to be damn near impossible. But I'm pretty sure that's why people TRAIN for these things, right? If it were that easy, nobody would need to train.

Run: 3 miles
Time: ~35 minutes
Weather: 65ish and WINDY
Next up: 3 miles tomorrow