Making do

Yikes, I haven't posted for awhile. Running has been less of a priority for the past couple of weeks, as I've been busy working on a school project, reconnecting with an old friend, and preparing for our AGM at work. I've been trying to do faster, higher-intensity runs to make the most of my time.

Yesterday I did two one-mile repeats. Since I don't live anywhere near a track, I found a crescent in a ritzy, relatively quiet neighbourhood that is exactly 500 m around. So I do three laps plus 100 m. I should really just set up my Garmin so it will auto-lap at a mile, but that would mean changing to imperial units and that's annoying.

Anyway, I hit my target of 5:10/km (see, then I'd have to convert that to min/mi, and I know it's 8-something, but...annoying), and actually was a little quicker on the first repeat. It still kicked my ass, though--so much so that I seriously contemplated changing it to 400 m repeats. But then I saw some presumably wealthy resident running farther out around the crescent, and I was determined to beat her. Ah, my competitive streak.

I'm hoping to do a 18 km LSD on Sunday. I've decreased my long-run distances over the last month, mostly because of a lack of time, but also because I'm running out of places to go to increase my distance. Vancouver is only so big, it seems.

I'm still trying to decide if I should join a Running Room clinic for the marathon. The goal race for the one I'm looking at is the Okanagan International Marathon, which is the same weekend as Victoria. I'm hoping at least a few other people in the group will be training for RVM, because it would kind of suck to train with them for five months and then race alone. Kind of REALLY suck. Training alone is really tempting, but I haven't been as disclipined, training for the Scotiabank Half alone, as I was training with the clinic for the Fall Classic Half last year. So, camaraderie versus the bliss of running alone: where do you stand?