After a slow reading month in February, I feel like I rebounded nicely in March -- falling back to one of my favorite genres -- thrillers and mystery -- with some really great books. 

Five Stars

Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a fun thriller with a completely deranged main character that I just could not put down. At the height of the covid housing crunch the main character is desperate to get out of her rental and find a real home so she and her husband can start a family. She's obsessed with one specific neighborhood and after losing out on countless houses has become a bit desperate. I love a book set in DC, so this one checked all the boxes for me.

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh man this book sucked me in so quickly and kept me engaged the whole time. What a winding twisty saga, while at the same time a little bit thriller-y. I liked the back and forth timelines jumping between the trial scenes and the lead up to the crime, and I was just so invested in what finding out what would happen.

Four Stars

The Wedding People by Alison Espach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book wasn't the light and fluffy read that I expected, and I mean that in the best possible way. It's dark at the start, which I wouldn't have guessed from the cover, but quickly becomes a book about human connection and what makes a strong friendship or relationship. I enjoyed spending time with this cast of strange and quirky characters and by the end of the book I was rooting for all of them.

Heart the Lover by Lily King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this much better than Writers and Lovers and the ending really ripped my heart out. But I just want to know why the main character has such terrible taste in men? Like why did we spend two books with her terrible relationship choices? Needless to say, this felt less pretentious and I tore through it, and truly the ending, ugh it was heartbreaking.

The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this book, but I did struggle to remember a lot of the stuff from the first book that would have been helpful to remember here. So just a warning that before you pick up this book, you might want to refresh yourself on what happened in the first book. Despite all that, I still enjoyed this book and the wrinkles Hannah and Owen and Bailey face.

Three Stars

My Husband's Wife by Alice Feeney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was good, but it felt a little similar to one of the other books of Alice Feeney's that I had read. When I started it I was like wait, have I read this already? The opening felt very similar. But the plot of the book was different, and I did enjoy the twisty turns even though parts did feel a little bit far fetched.

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We left off training updated in week 9, when I was dealing with a daycare cold and skipping a lot of runs. I only ran twice that week. One short run on Thursday when I was starting to feel a little bit better, and my longest run of training on Saturday.

I was nervous going into that long run on Saturday. I had started to feel a little bit better, but I was conflicted about doing the run. I didn't want to cause a setup, but I also didn't want to skip perhaps one of the most important runs of the training cycle. 

We were in PA visiting my family, and they still had a ton of snow on the ground, but I managed a slow meandering run on some of the streets I used to train on all the time, and luckily, it didn't cause a major health setback.

Rolling into week 10, my time was a bit condensed because of travel. I dropped an easy run and focused instead on one of the speed runs and then my long run at the end of the week. I also mixed in a good amount of strength training and yoga during week 10 to help alleviate some of the soreness that was building up in my legs from this training cycle.

Then week 11 brought the start of taper, which truly couldn't have come at a better time for me. My body was feeling a bit beat up, and knowing the end of this training cycle had arrived and shorter workouts were the on docket felt like a big relief.

I was able to do a stroller run on Sunday, which I hadn't been able to do in months because of the weather, so that was a really fun way to start the week. And then the rest of the workouts flowed smoothly. Incorporating at least one day of solid yoga and stretching has also been really great. 

I ended the week with one more long run of an hour and 15 minutes, and felt pretty good the whole time. 

This week the schedule calls for a couple of 30 minute runs, but I will likely just do one of those runs and then do a couple of walks instead to keep things loose. I'm hopeful that all this training will leave me in a good place for race day Saturday. 

I'm not looking to set any PRs. I'm just looking to finish feeling strong. After this training cycle, that feels like a fairly achieavable goal.

February was a short month and for whatever reason, it's the month I decided to pick very long books to read. As such, I only finished two. 

They were very different and interesting in their own ways. I gave them both 3.5s. No more preamble needed. Here are the books. 

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History – and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I grew up hearing my grandparents' generational habit of keeping everything was a product of the Great Depression and I had the faintest sense of what happened, so I was curious about this book and a chance to understand more. It was interesting to hear about some of the people who were making things happen on Wall Street, it was wild what used to be allowed in the banking industry and it was kind of fascinating to learn how Glass-Steagall came together. So I learned a lot. But I thought part of the first portion of the book moved a little slow. I found the second part way more interesting and faster moving.

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wish I could give a book 3.5 stars because I think that's where this book falls for me. It started like Devil Wears Prada -- a normal person trying to fit in at a high-end fashion magazine. Except the main character isn't normal, she's actually a terrible human being who continually makes awful choices as she tries to fit in. This book was like 500 pages, but I stuck it out because despite hating the main character (and maybe every other character), there was a slight mystery-ish plot line, I was curious about and I wanted to know if by the end of the book the main character would redeem herself.

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