I finished the second to last week of the RW summer run streak yesterday, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I'm a little shocked that I've made it this far.

Going into this run streak, I figured I'd do it for as long as I could until I inevitably ended up burnt out or with some annoying injury. (I was obviously hoping for the former over the latter.) But even with my unfortunate series of homeowner mishaps last week, I made it through, and now I'm only six days away from successfully completing the streak.



Week five was a pretty good week of running for me. I had a couple of shorter runs here and there, but I also went to the beach for a couple of days, and there's just something kind of magical about running along the ocean. Those three days of beach running really kicked my motivation up a notch to finish this streak strong.



Monday -- 3.1 miles. Started off the week with a solid (and humid) 5K.

Tuesday -- 3 miles. The humidity was no joke again. I love summer, but hate running in the humidity.

Wednesday -- 1 mile. Easy mid-week recovery mile.

Thursday -- 6 miles. Did an awesome run on the boardwalk at the beach. It was super flat, which was such a nice treat after running the DC hills for weeks on end. It also wasn't that humid. I felt like I was cruising right along on this run.

Friday -- 3 miles. My legs were super tired after Thursday's 6 miles, but I just love running on the boardwalk so much.

Saturday -- 1 mile. Tired legs got the best of me and I finished up my beach runs with an easy one miler.

Sunday -- 1 mile. I wasn't feeling overly motivated when I got home from the beach. I think I was just missing the nice beach views. So I did my one mile run to get it done. Also ended up doing a 26.5 mile bike ride later in the day, so was happy to have kept my run short.

Total: 18 miles.

Friends, the fourth week of the run streak was rough -- both mentally and physically.

It was tough mentally because I was really run down and tired all week. So finding motivation to get out the door was hard.

But it was also tough physically because last week my husband and I seemed determined to continually drop heavy pieces of furniture on my left foot.


Enjoy this serene view from our lake front AirBnB before I tell you about our series of mishaps.

It started on Monday when we were hanging some shelves in one of our closets. We had to move a heavy bathroom mirror left over from the previous owners. I tried to readjust my grip on it and it slipped right out of my hands, landed on my big toe and then shattered all over the floor.

Luckily, I just ended up with some serious bruising. I'm fairly confident my toe isn't broken, and I didn't actually cut myself on any of the broken glass.

Fast forward to Friday, when we were unloading the dishwasher. We knocked a wine glass from our cabinet, it shattered all over the counter, and when my husband was trying to grab a bag to collect the glass shards, he knocked a cabinet door off its hinges and it landed smack on top of my foot. My foot swelled and turned a nice purple color.

It was a comedy of errors of glass breaking and my foot taking a beating.

Despite all that, I still managed to run every day. I just had to do a lot of 1 mile runs because of my poor foot.

Monday -- 1.32 miles. We were still out of town so I kept this one short and sweet before we checked out of our AirBnb to head home.

Tuesday -- 3.1 miles. Despite dropping the mirror on my toe the night before, this run actually felt kind of OK. I was ready to stop at 1 mile if my toe bothered me too much, but it was surprisingly fine.

Wednesday -- 1 mile. Felt really run down all day, but at least got something in.

Thursday -- 2 miles. Was still feeling run down when I started this run and had only planned to do one mile, but the endorphins must have kicked in early because I decided to throw in an extra mile before heading home to present on a webinar for work.

Friday -- 3.1 miles. Felt like I was forcibly dragging myself out of bed to do this run, and then had some serious stomach cramping going on the whole time. Not my best run.

Saturday -- 1 mile. My foot was still pretty swollen and bruised Saturday morning after the cabinet door fell on it, so lacing up my running shoe was not the most comfortable. I tried to tie it a bit looser, so it wouldn't put so much pressure on the bruise, but I actually think that made the problem worse since the shoe slid around more. I was very glad when this run was done and I could curl up on the sofa with an ice pack on my foot.

Sunday -- 3 miles. No long run this week with all the things being dropped on my foot, but was excited to be able to go longer than 1 mile without much discomfort.

Total: 14 miles.

Far from my best week of running, but at least I managed to keep the run streak alive. Four weeks down. Two to go!

Week 3 officially marked the half way point of the RW Run Streak. It was also the first time since quarantine started that we'd started making some tentative plans to take a short road trip out of town so we could get a small change of scenery.

Knowing that we might be out of town over the weekend, I tried to front load the week with three milers so that I wouldn't feel too guilty if I ended up doing just a bunch of one mile runs while we were on our mini vacation to celebrate our anniversary.



I also intentionally tried to do some of my runs at a slower pace this week since I can tell the lack of rest days was making my legs feel super heavy. I had mixed results there.

Monday -- 3.1 miles. Nothing too special here just a solid 5K to start the week.

Tuesday -- 3.1 miles. Humidity started creeping back in and my legs felt tired.

Wednesday -- 3.1 miles. I intentionally tried to run this between a 10:30 and 11 minute mile pace. I did OK with that for the first mile, but miles 2 and 3 were closer to 10:15 each. Also squeeze in a short upper body strength session.

Thursday -- 1 mile. I needed a break from three mile runs and it was a thunderstorm-y day, so I squeezed in this quick 1 miler between downpours.

Friday -- 1 mile. This was the first run during the entire run streak where I just had zero motivation. I'm honestly impressed it took me this long to just straight up not want to run. When my alarm went off the thought of running filled me with dread, but I dragged myself out the door and plodded through a mile because I wasn't going to blow up the run streak over one bad day.

Saturday -- 10K. We were blessed with some amazing running weather on Saturday morning, and I was actually excited to go out and run. I did this run really, really slowly and finally felt like I actually truly embraced the concept of a long slow distance run. ("Long" is a bit of a stretch here since my distances are still kind of short). But I felt really good after this run.

Sunday -- 1 mile. This was supposed to be a recovery run, but I was running on a road that was pretty heavily wooded and about half way through I heard something crunching through the brush and it freaked me out, so I picked up the pace to get out of there. (I know that's literally the opposite thing you are supposed to do if there's a bear near you, but I didn't really think it was a bear and I didn't want to stick around to find out. I never really used to be afraid of wildlife on runs, but then a couple years ago went on a really unfortunate hike that has clearly left my traumatized).

Total: 18 miles.

As I've been doing my run streak, I have been getting a bit more lax with my strength training. So I'm going to try to make sure I find time for that. I've built a pretty solid strength base during quarantine and I don't want to lose my momentum there.

Three weeks of run streaking down, three to go!