Half Marathon training- week 1

This week was the first of 12 weeks of training for my half.  Before I share how the week went, I'll give you a quick rundown of what my weekly training plan looks like.
Sunday- short
Monday- rest
Tuesday- short
Wednesday- rest
Thursday- medium
Friday- rest
Saturday- long

Last weekend was Disciple Now, so I had to rearrange my days a little bit.

Saturday- 3 miles, average pace 11:44
This was a bit slower than I had hoped, but for the first day, I'll take it.

Monday (MLK Day, so I had the day off work)- 3 miles, avg pace 9:54
I definitely think this is wrong...

Thursday- 2 miles, avg pace 10:33
About halfway through this run, I started feeling some pretty bad shin splints coming on, so I decided I needed to cut it short.  I was aiming for 3 miles, but that just wasn't going to happen.  Given the fact that I had to do some walking, the pace wasn't terrible.

Saturday- 3 miles, avg pace 11:21
This was supposed to be 4 miles, but again, the shin splints.  I think it might be my shoes. I bought them in May, but apparently that's too long to use the same shoes. I went to Dick's Sporting Goods that afternoon to look at shoes, fully intending to get a professional opinion and then purchase the pair I liked on Amazon. #sorrynotsorry. I have a pretty flat arch, so the lady recommended a stability shoe.  Before I even left the store, I bought a pair of Asics GT-1000 3's on Amazon for $20 cheaper than the store.  They should arrive by Tuesday.

Sunday- 4 miles, avg pace 10:54
This is technically the first day of week 2, but since I switched my long and short days, I figured I'd include it in week 1. My friend Melissa came over this morning to run it with me. She's insane training for a full in February and routinely runs about an 8:30 mile, so I was a little nervous about running with her.  She's actually running the half with me (just for fun, might I add) so she was super nice about going a little slower than she's used to. My legs were still a little sore, so I made her walk quite a bit, but even still, I'm pretty happy with my pace.

We're expecting a few days of snow and rain this week, so I may be stuck on the treadmill this week. We'll see how it goes!

Brave

Have you ever felt like you allow fear to take over your life? Sorry, too heavy? Let me start over. Good morning! Beautiful day, isn't it? There. Now stop avoiding the question. Last week I finished a book called Let's All Be Brave by Annie F. Downs.  Y'all, it was incredible.  The premise of the book is simply an encouragement to stop living in fear and just step out in faith and do something brave. It doesn't even have to be anything huge, just something that you would normally look at and think, "Someday I'd like to try that" or even, "I could never do something like that". As I was reading, I started thinking back on all the times I didn't allow myself to do something out of fear of failing.  My family took a lot of vacations when I was little.  We would load up our RV and hit the road. My sister and I usually loved it. We would get to the RV park and see all the other kids that got dragged taken on vacation with their families and immediately hope to make some friends. Being the protective, older sister that I was, I'd send Kerry to scope out the prospects. Meaning, I would send her on a mission to approach kids at their campsites or the playground and say something like, "Hey! We have marshmallows at our trailer. Wanna be friends?" while I looked on anxiously from afar.  However, I feel like what often got said was more along the lines of, "My sister wants to know if you wanna be her friend," making the scene of me gawking in the distance even more weird.  The point is, I sent her to do the work because she was/is fearless.  She can be friends with anyone.  Even back then, if she got rejected, she would just shrug and move on to the next marshmallow-loving kid that wasn't creeped out by the chubby girl back at the trailer holding said marshmallows.  For me, the idea of approaching anyone and asking to be friends (especially without marshmallows) was out of the question. Even still, it is very rare that you will see me approaching anyone just to make conversation.  Maybe that comes off as rude, but really it's fear of rejection and failure.  Failure to look cool. Failure to be funny. Failure to make them want to talk to me ever again. Well let me tell you..reading this book really struck something in me.  I'm tired of living in fear. I decided to take the author up on her challenge to do one brave thing. So, I signed up for a half marathon! Insane? Maybe. Brave? I definitely think so.  Maybe this won't cure my fear of rejection from people, but it will definitely be a step towards conquering my fear of failure in general.  I'm excited to start training.  I'll also post updates of my training progress to have some accountability. Here's to 2015, and here's to being brave.