12/3 Easy 8 and some goals

I met up with Mike, Bruce, Ken, Damon, and Kamran this morning for an easy 8 miles mostly around town lake. My left achilles is still really tight so I need to work on some stretching over the next few days. I'm going to go to my first pilates class today too, which should be interesting. Adding in strength, stretching, etc should give me a better shot at achieving my goals...so I need to start getting in to that routine now.

Speaking of goals...I had a chance to meet with Steve yesterday to talk about some short term and more long term goals. The summary of the conversation is that I have a lot of work to do to achieve my long term goals. I feel pretty positive about things though because I know my biggest weaknesses are things that I have put very little effort in to improving. For example..building a base. This is something I haven't done very consistently, ever, until this last training season. But even then, I ended up being gone a lot over the summer so I missed out on a lot of miles. Building a bigger base this time around is a very doable thing for me. I know the road ahead will not be an easy one but I also know if I want something bad enough I'll do what it takes to get it.

For now, I'm just going to focus on running as much as I can while staying healthy so I have more of a base built up for Boston in April. It's not necessarily going to be an "a" race but I think it should be a good indicator of how much more work I need to do and how to proceed. I'd like to break 3 hours in Boston...but if it doesn't happen it's not the end of the world. My plan is to use December to get to a 60 miles per a week base building phase and mix that in with core, yoga/pilates, etc and then get going with the team when we regroup in January. I know being consistent over the holidays will be hard...but I'm looking at that as a mini test of my commitment to the goal.

All in all, I'm in an exciting place. I had a great marathon, a great wedding, and now I'm looking forward to more good things to come!