Still running...

Yes, it's true. My last post was in August... 2010. I'm bad at blogging. We all know now.

For whatever reason, I was sitting at work and thought of the blog and thought that I would write a post, so here I am. Just to give a recap of the last year of running, I am still at it after a few periods of amping things up and a few of no running for several weeks (thanks, Indiana winter). I have run three 5ks, and I'm very proud to say that I improved my time each race:

HOC 9/18/10 34:32
JB5k 10/23/10 32:35
IU Mini 5k 4/2/11 32:26 (super hilly... sad it wasn't faster but proud!)

Sadly, that IU Mini 5k was supposed to be the IU Mini Marathon, but I tried to push my body too hard in late December-early February and ended up with a massive case of burnout. I had no idea that overtraining could have a big an effect on your body as it does, but my runs got impossibly hard and I got sick and depressed and all kinds of weird stuff. So I scaled back and just did the 5k.

These days, I'm (slowly) starting to increase my mileage again. I did a 5 mile this morning, and I'm scheduled to do 6 next week and the week after to prep for the Minster Oktoberfest 10k the first Sunday in October. It will be my first 10k and is also part of a huge Oktoberfest in some random town in Ohio, so it should be a fun day even if the race goes badly. Yay beer!

To give you an idea of what kind of event this is, here's a picture of the official Minster Oktoberfest bobblehead and the beer that is made explicitly for it:

After the 10k, I'm going to do a super slow increase basically until April, because I'm planning to do the Mini Marathon for real and I think that my best shot is to be extremely conservative about increasing my mileage. I'll do each new long run distance for two weeks and then have a scale-back week in between. Hopefully it will go better this year!

So that's what's happening. :)