Holidays, procrastination and preparation

Well, the holidays got to me after all...I ate terrible (but delicious) food, and got incredibly lazy. The only time I ran was on Christmas Day, and it was not good. I've hit the road only a couple times since then...with going to Chicago over New Years and then starting a new contract this week, there just wasn't time. Well, more like I didn't make time, with everything else going on.

My original goal was to run in the same half marathon in February in Gainesville that I did last year. But now that race is less than 6 weeks away and I haven't run more than 4 miles in a very long time. Not sure that I can still do that race, but I'm going to do a few practice runs and see how it goes. If I feel like I can do it, I might give it a shot. I don't know, part of me wonders if less preparation doesn't somehow give me an advantage...I mean, I've approached everything else in my life with procrastination and waiting until the last minute, and it's worked out pretty well so far. We'll see...In any case, I did a short run today to get warmed up, 2.25 miles, and I did really well! Averaged less than 8 minutes a mile, I don't know if I've ever pushed myself at that pace, probably because I'm always focused on distance and endurance over speed. I'm pretty proud of myself...

I'm excited because I've got this new app on my phone that tracks my distance, pace, time, etc. If only I could get it to work right...might be user error though, if you know what I mean. I checked my progress after the first mile and found that the only thing the program was tracking was my time, I guess I had forgotten to turn on the GPS. Had to go to mapmyrun.com to find out the exact distance, in order to calculate my pace. I'll test the program out again this week, on my next run.