Dead Legs

After my 7 mile run last Wednesday, I thought it was going to be nice to give my legs a few days of rest from running. How'd that work out for me, as we walked mile after mile at Disney World Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then sit in the car for hour after hour on Sunday? Not. Too. Good. Ah - It really wasn't that bad, but after a 7 mile run on Monday morning, I could tell my legs felt "heavy." It certainly wasn't from eating too much over Thanksgiving - I think that is impossible to do at Disney - it'd cost an arm and a leg to eat too much! Though my legs did feel heavy, it still really felt great to get out and actually run Monday morning. It really wasn't even all that hard to get myself up and out the door - I guess my legs wanted to be free after all the time that we spent in the car on Sunday.

Yesterday was my interval training day, and so I ran down to the park and did my laps. When I look at my time, I can see that I am progressing, and I think that I can feel that I am progressing. But I was very conscious of the feeling that my legs were just "dead." I can understand why they felt that way, and looking back, maybe I should not have run intervals yesterday. But I was able to justify it because I knew that I would not be running today. So when it was time to hit the hard run part of the intervals, I really hit it. And though I wanted to cut some of those intervals short, I pushed through them. And though I wanted to walk some of the recovery jogs, I pushed through those too. This week I ran the following intervals:
Lap - 3 hard/3 light
1/2 lap - 2 hard/2 light
1/4 lap - 2 hard/2 light
Hill - sprint

I did it all, and my average pace (between the hard and light running) was 8:40 for a total of 5 miles.

As a side note, I also booked my room for the Myrtle Beach Bi-Lo Marathon in February! Starting to feel real! It also was still neat to visit Disney World last weekend. Throughout the parks, I was reminded of the marathon and running through certain parts, and even as we rode the Disney buses from one place to another, I was reminded of some of those painful stretches. Still, it actually made me more excited about the MB Marathon, and it reassured me that I definitely want to run Disney again in the future - just not when it's 26 degrees!