I'll get my act together eventually...

I should be training for a half marathon right now.

Instead, I played catch up this week since I only ran five times between 2/06 - 2/19. That happened because I hurt (bruised?) my medial cuneiform, aka the knobby bone directly underneath your big toe. Although the pain was bad, it didn't affect my stride; however, I decided to take the rest of the week off to let it heal. After that initial week, I guess I just didn't feel like running. It looks like half training will begin tomorrow, if I write up a plan between now and Monday's run.

I'm not entirely sure how I hurt the medial cuneiform. I've narrowed down the culprits to my shoes, recently adding a fifth day of running, incorporating tempos, and landing on the ball of my foot. The pain is just about gone completely, though I'm still concentrating on landing midfoot (I wasn't intentionally landing on the balls of my feet before), paying closer attention to which pair of shoes might have caused the bruise, and going back to running four days a week.

According to my calendar, I have just nine weeks left to train. Unfortunately, those two weeks of inconsistency were enough to make me lose my mental fortitude (I'm weak) as well as a little bit of my fitness. Since I signed up and I do want to run a good race, I'm just going to ignore my self doubt and focus on completing runs.

Nine weeks is enough time to put together a decent plan, and coming off of a solid two month build up period, I don't feel like I've let too much time pass even with the setback. I figure I'll split the weeks up like so: 5-3-1, where 5 is the "intro" phase, maintaining an average distance while increasing long runs and continuing a weekly tempo; 3, the "focused" phase, where I add another weekly (but mild) speed workout, something relatively simple such as strides or fartleks, and my longest run will peak during this period; the final week will be the taper, which I don't need to explain.

Yes, I made this up off the top of my head. No, it's not groundbreaking and my terminology is stupid. But that's what I have for now.

I ended this week with 22 miles, which isn't bad for running 7 miles last week. (Yes. Total.) I'll make up any lost fitness this next week. Hopefully by then the weather here will improve enough to make my life a little easier.

Waah.