Ramping up the mileage

With any sort of athletics, at some point, you have to start bringing up the effort at practice if you want to see progress.

That's been my goal for the past week: ramp up the effort.

Despite signing up for the Mankato Half Marathon in October, running has been consistently inconsistent in my schedule. I'd get a decent 8-mile day in, then I'd take 3 days off. This is partly due to schedule, but primarily due to desire. I want to do well in the race, but I don't want the training to consume my free time.

However, in the past week, I've made a more concentrated effort to work running into my regular schedule. I figured October 23 will be here before I know it and nobody wants to be the guy gasping for air and coping with leg pains at Mile 9.

Including the Norseman 5k run tomorrow, I will log 31 miles of running this week. A pedestrian amount compared to the number of miles I was putting in during training for Grandma's, but it's definitely progress.

The training runs this week included this fun little route on Thursday. Kind of just made it up as I went along. The route offers a killer hill (Main Street) and it takes you through a couple parks and MSU campus. It also offers a lot of side roads you can take to lengthen the run if you choose.

I will have to do longer runs than that in the next few weeks (it only wound up being about a 10K distance-wise), but the run helped convince me that I'm making progress toward race day.