The last two days I've gotten in solid runs that continue to boost my confidence about this half marathon I have coming up.

Wednesday I had scheduled a 40 minute challenging run. I decided that I wanted to try some speed work on the treadmill. I took it easy though because I remembered how poorly things turned out last Monday when I tried to do some speed.

My plan for the run was this: Warm up 5 minutes at 5.o mph. Increase to 5.5 mph for the next five minutes. From there crank the speed up to 6.5 mph for a quarter mile interval and then pull it back down to 5.5 for a half mile of recovery. Repeat until the last 30 minutes of the run were up.

I decided to do half mile recovery because I wanted to make sure I wasn't pushing myself too hard and I didn't want to risk any shin splints or anything. Looking back on it thought I probably could have just done a quarter mile recovery in between each speed set. That will most likely be my plan for next time.

This morning's run was a scheduled 30 minute easy run. But let's be honest, on the treadmill I need to play with either speed or incline to keep myself from getting horribly bored.

So here's what I did: I started out the first 5 minutes at 5.0 mph, and again increased to 5.5 mph for the next five minutes. From there I added .1 mph every minute for the next 10 minutes. My speed topped out at 6.5 mph for one minute. For the last ten minutes I decreased the speed .1 mph, ending on a nice easy 5.5 mph.

I'm not sure what kind of run you could even call that. It wasn't exactly the "easy" run I was supposed to do today, but it wasn't super challenging either.

Tomorrow's another cross-training day and I think I'm going to try to hit the 5:45 a.m. spinning class again.

Catch ya' later!