Hitting the Plateau

Well, if you were wondering if I was too busy or just forgot how to blog, you were wrong.  I really wanted the next blog to be a picture of my scale with my poundage under 190lbs.  Well, it seems that I have hit a plateau, and I can't get off it...until today.  For the last week or so, I've been hovering between 190.2 and 193.  It's been a crazy and discouraging battle!  I think one of the reasons is because my workouts have been cut short.  We got a ton of snow last Wednesday, and running outside just wasn't an option.  Thursday, Jenn and I did a 3.5 miler, but it wasn't all that intense.  Sunday was our long run, which was actually supposed to be a 5k race.  Well, I'm not the biggest fan of 5k's because I know that there's no way that I'm going to win it, so it just ends up being a waste of money.  I can go run 3.1 miles out on the road somewhere for FREE!  So, Jenn, Nick and I decided to run 6 miles instead.  It was super tough this time.  We had done 6 miles the week before, but it was different this week.  For awhile, we couldn't understand why it felt so much harder, and then we realized what the difference was.  There was a couple inches of snow on the roads, and we were spending more energy to run our normal pace than we did last week.  It was kind of weird because we hit a stretch of clear sidewalk and our pace shot way up.  We ended at a slow run of 6 miles at 9:53/mile.  This next week is 7 miles, and we'll be shooting for somewhere between 9:30's and 9:45's.

With renewed determination, I am GOING to drop below 190lbs this week!  I want so badly to register for the Steelhead Ironman 70.3, but I told myself I had to meet this goal first.  I've been doing a lot of biking on the trainer recently.  I put my aerobars on the other day and am really enjoying getting back into that position.  It makes the workouts a little more interesting.  Here's a picture from last night's ride:

Today was incredible as far as working out.  I had read on IRONDIVA's blog about her speed workouts where she runs with a partner and then sprints around the track to catch them.  You can read about it HERE.  That sounded like a great way to do speed work, but both my running partners, Jenn and Nick weren't available when I got out of class.  So, I decided to do a short but fast (for me) run.  I ran 2 miles and wanted to average 8 min/miles.  Well, I pushed it, and this is what my Garmin read when I was done:

7:31/mile!!!  That may be slow for some of you, but that's one of my faster runs.  I was pretty proud! (The lower left hand box says 5:00/mile, but that was the current speed I guess when I snapped this picture.)  Right after my run, I went downstairs and got on the trainer for a solid 30 minutes.  It felt great to workout today!  With minimal caloric intake for today, I know that I'll be under 190 tomorrow morning.  Expect to see a picture of the scale soon!

Jenn's running a 5k race this Sunday, so I we'll see how it goes, and I'll put some pictures up too.  Good luck to all of you that are training for something too!