Running - Is It Consistency?

Um, duh, yes.

I manage to forget that whenever I have a hiatus from running. I'll start running after a break and feel like I'm not doing well when I can't run faster than a 12 minute mile. So sometimes I'll get frustrated and give up on running because I feel like there's no point and that I'll never improve.

Because I forget, again and again, that consistency is key.

When I run on a regular basis, I get better at running. Period. So easy to state. So hard to maintain!

For the last three weeks, I've managed to get three runs in per week. Not a huge number of runs, nor a large quantity of miles, but at least three runs between Sunday and Saturday. Ideally, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday are the days that I'll run, but last week I ran Thursday, Friday and Saturday after my ankle was hurting a bit on that Tuesday.

I did run yesterday, so week four of my running streak has started off on a good foot. I ended up with some faster times last week, but yesterday I was just going for slow and steady because I was very sore. The run became more about the mental effort to keep running rather than the physical effort to run more quickly. I mean, I could stop at any time. There is literally nothing forcing me to run; just my own stubbornness to push past the pain.

Yesterday's run was pretty hot though. It's starting to get warm enough that I do not want to be running around noon. That's how my schedule is set up right now though, to do a run on Tuesdays and Thursdays during my lunch hour. I'm not sure how I might go about doing an early morning run with my current routine.

Other than being too warm for my taste, it was a beautiful day for a run. Blue skies with just wispy streaks of cloud for character, bright, warm sun, flowers perfuming my path and new, green growth everywhere. The lilacs are starting to bloom. I try to get a spray of lilacs every year, because they're my favorite.

I will be bumping up my weekly runs to four times a week, starting next week, as long as I finish my three this week. I'll still keep the distances short. So far, I've been doing a little over 2 miles on my weekday runs and trying to run longer on Saturdays (though one Saturday I ran just over a mile to keep the streak alive on a day I really didn't want to run). Three plus miles on Saturday will be supplemented by 3 plus miles on Sunday - both of the days that I can run early, before the sun rises if necessary.

I'll see if I can get some consistency with 4 times a week, and take it from there.