Day 1, Week 1: A deceptive descending ladder, some dogs, and hatred of water-bottle carrying

So technically I was supposed to do my first run of the training plan last night.  But then this happened.

So I got up this morning and did my descending ladder, which consisted of one each of these fun metered intervals: 1200, 1000, 800, 600, and 400.  Seems like it would be easy, right?  The distances get shorter and shorter.  But NOPE that's not the way the Run Less, Run Faster plan works.  In case you didn't know, this plan has you do three key runs a week: one speed/track workout, one tempo run, and one long run.  Using a recent 5K time as your guide, you determine what your speeds are for your tempo runs as well as all of your track workout distances.  This means that for each one of the distances I ran that are listed above, I had to keep upping the speed for each one.

It's enough to make a girl go crazy.  And her cat to eat dog food.

But I got the run done on my trusty treadmill this morning.  My next run is up on Friday, a 7 mile tempo.  I have every intention of doing it until I find an excuse Friday morning not to do it.  We'll see. One thing I have to motivate me is some NEW GEAR:

I've had the FlipBelt for a while and absolutely love it.  I just got the water bottles for it, because who the heck likes to carry a water bottle while running?  Not this girl.  While the bottles themselves are not huge (about 300 mL; I bought a set of 2 for around $20), they're also not me carrying a heavy sloshing water bottle in my hand mentally repeating "I HATE WATER BOTTLES WHERE IS MY HYDRATION BACKPACK OH WHO KNOWS" over and over again during a run. Tune in on Friday for my review of how well they worked on that tempo run.

And tune in tomorrow for a review of my first real weight workout in 2 weeks.  I'm pretty sure there will be lots of soreness and graphic pictures of my barbell.