Finding Balance

Lately I've been struggling to find the right balance between challenging myself but still enjoying my workouts. I decided to really push myself to try to run faster, but it ended up being a very frustrating experience. I felt like a failure, and after one particularly bad 2-mile run that ended with me in tears about how much I sucked, I decided maybe I was trying to improve too quickly and I decided to scale back a bit. I'm still doing the same workouts and following the Nike+ 5k training program and everything, but I'm going to let myself increase my speed slowly.

Yesterday I had a 3 mile run and it went really well! I stuck with a slower but steady speed which was still 1/2 mph faster than I was running a few weeks ago and was able to run the whole time plus some! It felt AMAZING and I felt successful again. My next run is 4 miles. I was looking forward to trying it tomorrow but I have to get home early for a delivery so it's looking like I'll probably need to put it off until Friday or Saturday.

Today's crossfit felt great too! It was AMRAP (as many rounds as possible), for 20 minutes, of 6 knees to elbows (which I still suck at but I'm really trying to get my knees up higher), 3 pull ups with the bands, run 1 lap, then 9 step ups. I did 10 rounds and it felt great! I had to do the last 9 step ups after the time was up, but I wanted to get in all 10 rounds. The craziest thing to me is that the first couple rounds are so hard and slow, but then you can speed up sooo much as you go along. Seems like it would be the opposite, but it's kind of neat how it works. One of these days I'm going to need to figure out how to jump up instead of doing step ups.

Things are going well and I'm feeling good! :)