Milestone and Resolution FAIL

Two things. Well, three really.

1. I didn't post last week-so much for that "resolution." But the great thing is that I can just write it off as a bad job and try to do better this week. Hopefully.

2. You may have noticed a blog layout change. I do this every now and then, mostly because I just get bored with the way the blog looks. This time it was largely due to the fact that I wanted to include a picture in the header, and my old format wasn't the best for such a thing. This picture is bigger than I want it, but my edited picture keeps coming up as corrupt for some reason so whatever. For those who are interested, this picture was taken in Istria in May, 2008 on the way to this tiny church with really great murals on the inside. The countryside was beautiful, and this is one of my favorite pictures from that day.

3. Now, for the real meat of the post. I reached a running milestone this weekend! I posted a while back about how I'm a pretty slow runner, but then I realized I run about the speed a butterfly flies so that was a nice discovery. I've still been trying to get my speed up, though, and this weekend I reached a new level. Usually on the treadmill I run between 5.4 and 5.6 mph, with elevation varying depending on the run setting I'm using (when I do a 5K a couple of times a week there are some hills, and then on "easy" days I just run on 0 elevation). R and I have been upping our cardio times to 45-60 minutes/day. This weekend I got on the treadmill expecting to do my usual 5.4-5.6 speed, but after about 15 minutes I decided to see what would happen if I bumped it up to 6.0 mph. I did so, planning to do 10 minutes on that if I could (I'd only ever run about 2 minutes at 6.0 before). At the ten minute mark I decided to see if I could make 15. Then if I could make 20. Then...25. Then I felt like my legs were going to fall off, so I walked for 5 minutes and THEN finished is up with another 5 bringing it to 30 whole minutes at 6.0! I then ran another 15 at 5.4. I think I ended up running about 5.3 miles on Saturday, which is the most I've ever run and the fastest I've ever run. Wahoo!

Yesterday my legs were definitely sore, but it was so cool to know that I could go that speed for that amount of time. Hopefully I'll be able to build up the endurance so it doesn't feel quite so out of control at the end of the 30 minutes, and then 6.0 can be my normal pace and I can stay there for a while. Sweet.

As R said, it's crazy to think about how far we've come in terms of running since we started in the winter of 2007 by running 1 minute and walking 1 minute for 30 minutes. But the method from the book R got for Christmas from his brother worked, and here we are running for more extended periods of time. Awesome.

In other big news, I'm doing Team in Training with the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. I'll have another post forthcoming on that and how YOU can help out. : )