The Tuesday Double

Hello my sweet pals! I hope you are feeling loved and happy and warm tonight. I am curled up drinking hot tea with milk and honey while I type this and it's just feeling really wonderful. I wanted to tell you about my run today because I feel like we may be at a breakthrough moment. You know when you are running/training/grinding for weeks and weeks and maybe you start to wonder when the improvements will peak their lil heads out from your legs and super-mario charge you up the climb? Yes, yes we all have felt that before.

Any way, I have really been enjoying my training recently. There's been endless inspiration from other women around me (who will soon be featured on the website-yay!) and I've been really excited about trying to get faster and stronger. Excitement is helpful, hard work is required, but time tends to operate independently of our wants and desires. We can be overflowing with happiness and hardness and yet improvements are bound to time. They peak out when time says "ok, go ahead". Time is wiser than us all. It knows when we need encouragement and when we need a lesson and patience. Time maybe threw me a bone today!

I hadn't been getting frustrated--on the contrary--I was feeling encouraged by all the space there is to grow. It's like standing in a meadow filled with wildflowers at the base of a mountain. Every single flower is some piece of growth we can meet and pick off on our way up the mountain. Still, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to see improvements or if I needed to change up training and push even harder.

So I went out for my run this morning. I was aiming for 6 or 7 miles with about 600 feet of climbing (which I know isn't a ton but hello I live on the east coast in the Piedmont region). I felt good and strong and grateful to be out there. This is one of my favorite routes in Chapel Hill. It's a super beautiful, windy steep road with pine trees all around:) I finished up happy and went in to work. 

Tuesdays have become one of my two double days of the week and when I finished up at work I realized I felt really strong and basically fine. There was just something in me that really wanted to be pushing up the climbs and winding down Laurel Hill again for today. So without even really thinking about it, I put my shoes on, turned on a podcast and headed out. I told myself as long as I got 3 miles for run 2 I would feel happy. 

I ended up doing the full 6 again which brought my total mileage for the day to 12 with lots of feet of climbing. I feel amazing! My legs are a little sleepy but my heart feels so, so happy and fulfilled. It's these times that really show me how my running is so much more than just exercise. It has the ability to shape our heart if we give it enough time! Also I'm starting to make some big goals and big dreams and they cannot be accomplished without good hard work!

So if you have been feeling a little stagnant I encourage you to keep pushing. Maybe add some fast runs into your upcoming week! Or maybe you need to back off a little and give your body a rest. We need to rest to rebuild to be strong to push! I would love to hear how your training is going right now:)