We left off training updated in week 9, when I was dealing with a daycare cold and skipping a lot of runs. I only ran twice that week. One short run on Thursday when I was starting to feel a little bit better, and my longest run of training on Saturday.

I was nervous going into that long run on Saturday. I had started to feel a little bit better, but I was conflicted about doing the run. I didn't want to cause a setup, but I also didn't want to skip perhaps one of the most important runs of the training cycle. 

We were in PA visiting my family, and they still had a ton of snow on the ground, but I managed a slow meandering run on some of the streets I used to train on all the time, and luckily, it didn't cause a major health setback.

Rolling into week 10, my time was a bit condensed because of travel. I dropped an easy run and focused instead on one of the speed runs and then my long run at the end of the week. I also mixed in a good amount of strength training and yoga during week 10 to help alleviate some of the soreness that was building up in my legs from this training cycle.

Then week 11 brought the start of taper, which truly couldn't have come at a better time for me. My body was feeling a bit beat up, and knowing the end of this training cycle had arrived and shorter workouts were the on docket felt like a big relief.

I was able to do a stroller run on Sunday, which I hadn't been able to do in months because of the weather, so that was a really fun way to start the week. And then the rest of the workouts flowed smoothly. Incorporating at least one day of solid yoga and stretching has also been really great. 

I ended the week with one more long run of an hour and 15 minutes, and felt pretty good the whole time. 

This week the schedule calls for a couple of 30 minute runs, but I will likely just do one of those runs and then do a couple of walks instead to keep things loose. I'm hopeful that all this training will leave me in a good place for race day Saturday. 

I'm not looking to set any PRs. I'm just looking to finish feeling strong. After this training cycle, that feels like a fairly achieavable goal.

February was a short month and for whatever reason, it's the month I decided to pick very long books to read. As such, I only finished two. 

They were very different and interesting in their own ways. I gave them both 3.5s. No more preamble needed. Here are the books. 

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History – and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I grew up hearing my grandparents' generational habit of keeping everything was a product of the Great Depression and I had the faintest sense of what happened, so I was curious about this book and a chance to understand more. It was interesting to hear about some of the people who were making things happen on Wall Street, it was wild what used to be allowed in the banking industry and it was kind of fascinating to learn how Glass-Steagall came together. So I learned a lot. But I thought part of the first portion of the book moved a little slow. I found the second part way more interesting and faster moving.

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wish I could give a book 3.5 stars because I think that's where this book falls for me. It started like Devil Wears Prada -- a normal person trying to fit in at a high-end fashion magazine. Except the main character isn't normal, she's actually a terrible human being who continually makes awful choices as she tries to fit in. This book was like 500 pages, but I stuck it out because despite hating the main character (and maybe every other character), there was a slight mystery-ish plot line, I was curious about and I wanted to know if by the end of the book the main character would redeem herself.

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