Saturday, October 25, 2008

The Best of Both Worlds

I always want the best of all worlds... and I am always striving to get it... in all aspects of my life. Unfortunately, I have an addiction. Fortunately, my addiction is to running races, and it's not anything that's negative. My addiction has allowed me to manage my life better, given me an outlet when I am stressed, lose weight and has improved my health significantly over the last 2 years. I love running, but the only downer to becoming a stronger and faster runner is the time commitments. As I said, I want to have a strong business, invest a lot of time into my family, and run good! So, I have developed a new running regimen to allow that to happen.
I am going to try and run at work now that the weather is nicer during the middle of the day. I will have to use my lunch break to get in a few miles, and will bring my lunch, so I won't have to waste time buying lunch ( and waste money!)
The whole idea of me doing this is to maintain the shape I am in, so that I can run races whenever I want. The great thing about running races is the actual event. It's exciting, competitive and it's just a great way to test your true level of fitness. The bad thing about training to be competitive is the early mornings to train, and having to be on such a strict regimen all the time.
It is always nice to run, but this week it has been extremely pleasurable... because I am not having to wake up at 4:30 to hit the roads. I don't really miss that at all. But I do miss not having a big race coming up... so I think I will be doing some more big races over the next few months... just keeping myself in good shape at all times, and deciding on the fly whether or not I want to run races on the weekend. More importantly, Kerry is 100% on board with it, and realizes how much fun I am having participating in the sport of running. But as I said, I have to figure out how I don't have to go through the major grind of intense training, and still be able to stay in great shape.
My plan is to run more often, but less time for each run...mileage is the key, so I will transition into doing that, while trying to average 30-40 miles every week. Let's see if it works.