I'm not generally a fan of running with music. Running with podcasts is my go-to since it allows me to keep my pace totally separate from what I'm listening to while still keeping me engaged with something else (if you are looking for a recommendation for a podcast to try while running, I can't suggest Hardcore History strongly enough). Occasionally though, I will feel compelled to crank some tunes to get motivated for my runs and I've been doing so more lately as I feel st

I'm not sure if it was taking some time off of doing hard workouts, waiting until the temperature wasn't utterly oppressive, relaxing from my previous fixation on pacing with several days of running unplugged, or a combination of these, but I set an all time personal record this week. I hit a 3.12 mile run in 24:29, averaging 7:50 per mile. The sub-25 minute 5k was a revised version of my goal to get a 5k distance run in under 30 minutes, but as I worked my speed up, I ratch

This past week has been a pretty intense stretch of training. I actually ended up hitting personal records twice this week for pace and for distance. Tuesday, I had an easy 3 miler scheduled and the weather was pretty great. At that point, I hadn't been able to run much recently due to weather and travel so, without realizing it, I got a little wound up and was moving along at an abnormally fast pace for me. When I got my audio cue at the half mile mark and heard that my a

For some reason, I'll periodically hit stretches of time where I make a lot of progress in distance, time, or both on my runs. I had recently felt like I was running along on a plateau and then suddenly, it felt like my times started dropping fairly dramatically. In one of my last posts, I noticed the downward trend of my times for long runs, and I have continued that trend this weekend. Yesterday, I got my 10 mile run in with an average of 9:21/mile. My pace is getting m

I imagine it's pretty obvious to those who know me that I am a big Carolina Panthers fan; they're one of the main topics of my posts to Facebook these days. If you keep up with that sort of thing, you'll also know that they lost their playoff game yesterday against the Seattle Seahawks. I did see some things from the team that gave me cause to be optimistic for next season, but overall, the game wasn't pretty so I was pretty bummed last night and I resolved to start my half