When I saw the calendar for this past week, I knew there was the possibility that this could happen. I ended the week with only 2 training runs. That’s all. Let’s face it. These kind of weeks need to be few and far between. The coming week has even more distractions to it that could lead to similar results. However, the news is not all bad. Let’s see how the week went.

Tuesday was supposed to be the first run of the week. However, I was too under the weather to make it out for a run and into work. So, it ended up as a non-planned rest day.

Wednesday, I did manage to get out the door to run. This was a slow run from the start. The first mile took a little more than 11 minutes and it didn’t get much better from there. I was probably still a little less than 100% for this run. However, I was well enough to get out and make an effort. This was the best my legs had in them. So, the slow run is better than no run at all. Right?

Thursday was a planned rest day. When I saw my weekend schedule, I knew that I’d have to take this day off and do my long run on Friday morning instead of Saturday. I’ll explain more when I get into the weekend.

On Friday evening and all day Saturday, Brooke and I were attending an adoption conference in Orange County. So, I took the day off from work. That gave me the time on Friday morning to get in 7 miles! To be honest, I kind of played around with my run/walk intervals throughout this run. The first mile was a little slower than I have been running this route. So, I decided to use this run to see what would happen if I altered my run/walk intervals. For the first 2 miles, I ran 30 seconds, walked a minute. I finished those miles a little under 22 minutes total. That wasn’t bad. However, I’ve been faster. Since I knew the next 3 miles would be on more of an incline, I switched the intervals to run 30 seconds, walk 90 seconds. It slowed my overall pace down. However, I wasn ‘t too much off the pace I had the last time I ran 7 miles over this route! I finished 5 miles in an hour and 1 minute. The nice part in all of this is that I felt like it helped me recover from how hard I pushed in the first two miles.

So, after getting past the 5 mile point, I switched up again. This time I’d run 1 minute, walk 1 minute. It did help me make up some time in overall pace. However, I was still slightly over a 12 minute per mile pace at the end of 6 miles. So, rather than killing myself over the last mile, I switched up again to run 30 seconds, walk a minute. By the last 0.2 miles, I was feeling a little gassed. So, my overall time was just over a 12 minute per mile pace. At the end of the day, it wasn’t a horrible run. However, I’ve been faster. Sometime, though, we need to use our training runs to try new things. That’s what my Friday morning 7 mile run was about.

As I mentioned, Friday evening Brooke and I headed down to South Orange County for the Chose Joy Event. You might remember that Brooke and I attended this event last year on the night before the OC Half Marathon. This year, they’ve expanded the adoption conference to Friday and Saturday. As a couple who is in the wait to be chosen to adopt, going to an event like this gives us the opportunity to be around other people who “get it.” Unless you’ve ventured down this path of adoption, there is a limit to how much you can understand. The weekend was both emotional as well as a total blessing!

Because we were gone all evening Friday and all day Saturday, we had to spend Sunday doing out chores for the week. All the hustle and bustle of the week finally caught up with me and I was too wiped to hit up the gym. That leaves me with only 2 workouts for the week. Not good.

The good news is that, on Tuesday, I found out that I got into the Chicago Marathon as a charity runner! A week and a half ago, the organizers of the Chicago Marathon sent out an email to those of us in the lottery asking us to consider taking a guaranteed spot running for a charity. So, I decided to check out the list of official charities. I thought that it couldn’t hurt to at least consider this. If there was a charity that stood out, I’d look into it more. As I looked, I came across a charity called Adoption-link. How perfect! I contacted the charity to see what they were all about and how to run for them. It all looked good. So, on Tuesday, I signed up! Once my fundraising web sit is set up, I’ll let you all know more. For  now, I’m just exited about running my first world major marathon and my first time as a charity runner!

As busy as this week turned out, week 18 will be even crazier. Tomorrow morning, while some of you will be registering for the 2016 Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend races, I’ll be flying to Walt Disney World for a week-long vacation with my wife, sister-in-law and some friends! It was my hope that I’d have time to prepare blog posts and schedule them to be posted while I’m gone. However, I didn’t have that kind of time. So, this will be my last post for a week. If you follow me on Instagram (whyirundisney) or Twitter (gloucks7), you can follow along while I’m away.

Have a fantastic week everyone!