November 2013 recap

November stats. One of my lower mileage months in a while!
Run: 146.6 km
Time: 14:19:09


My primary focus this month after the Road 2 Hope has been rest and recovery. After an intense fall training/racing season,  I was tired. And there were a few nagging pains here and there - the groin problem from Scotiabank that kept coming back, a random pain in my thigh that come out of nowhere (and disappeared about as quickly). Nothing particularly major, but enough to know my body was saying it needed a bit of a break. So I took some days off, and now I've dialed back the mileage and taken my running slow and easy for the last couple of weeks. Other than that one LSD with Sam where Sam forgot the 'slow' part - although it's pretty good evidence of how far my running has come that a 5:34/km pace over 14k wasn't hard to maintain. But I'm mostly skipping speedwork for a while and sticking with easy running. I'm now ache and pain free and feeling really energized and excited about winter training.

Why do I haul my ass out of bed early to run? This helps.

My husband and I managed to get in a run together (yay for ditching the children!), and my brother came out to Burlington to run part of the Around the Bay route. I get way too much enjoyment out of taking people on the hilly section of the route for the first time.

Beautiful run along the lake on a very very cold day.

I've also visited the Chedoke stairs twice, which is always a good time. I'm not doing any speed work right now, but climbing those stairs really bumps up the heart rate. I love how there are always at least a half dozen people running up and down, too. Very motivating. It's a terrific low impact but very intense workout.

289 steps. I can get about 2/3 of the way up running before I have to slow down and walk the rest. Future goal: Run the whole thing without stopping.

The view from the top of the stairs. It's prettier in summer and fall, that's for sure.

I made it back to my once a week TRX class, and started doing some TRX/kettlebell work.  I've been doing this workout that I found online somewhere or other and I like it because I can do it at home with my knock-off TRX and kettlebells:

warm up
10 burpees
15 pushups (full pushups, on toes)
10 burpees
15 TRX rows (suspending as much body weight as possible)
10 burpees
15 TRX pikes
10 burpees
20 bodyweight squats (or pistol squats if feeling particularly peppy)
10 burpees
20 kettlebell swings

Take breaks when needed to complete each exercise with perfect form. Repeat entire sequence x2.That's a hundred burpees total. It's painful, but in a good way. Sort of. Admittedly the first time I did it I was sore for 4 days afterwards.

I need this shirt.

I've also been doing more yoga, especially this video. Feels good. All part of laying the groundwork for marathon training in January! It may be the off season, but I'm not slacking, that's for sure. Not with all that yummy holiday food to eat in December. I plan to keep running easy (around 40k a week), strength train 2x a week, and then in mid-December I'll start increasing the run mileage to 50k a week so I'm prepared to start my training plan in January.

Oh right, time for this sort of thing again.

Basically, it's all good. I am really enjoying running easy and without much of a structured plan right now (other than a general target for weekly mileage), so I plan to continue like that for a bit.

And now the countdown is on to Christmas vacation. Bring on the holiday food!

Random: I asked my husband to buy me some chocolate. This is why he's not allowed to have a Costco membership.