Last night was a cadence interval workout, and I nailed it. As in, “damn, girl — you fast!” nailed it. I’ve upped my minimum cadence during the intervals, and over the course of the workout (15 one-minute intervals) I averaged a minimum cadence of 177 spm.

I also think I’ve figured out the course of the Kim’s Bad Knee 5K. This route came in at the perfect distance. I’d like it to be more winding, but I don’t know if I can create a winding route that doesn’t backtrack over previously-trod paths; more importantly, I don’t know if I can re-create that route for the race course. The route I did last night is repeatable, and it’s got a lot of crazy single-track twists.

This was a nice victory, as I ate entirely too much sweet stuff at the Diocesan Convention last weekend and found myself at over 170 pounds when I weighed myself Monday morning. I know weight isn’t everything, but my body fat percentage was also up. I can’t blame this weight gain on being overly-hydrated. I was also pretty disappointed with how slowly I ran on my weekend easy run.

I’m kind of ambivalent about that, though. Part of me thinks my overall pace should be improving because I’m improving on my tempo & interval workouts during the week. On the other hand, one athletes don’t improve much is that they go too hard on easy workouts and too easy on hard workouts. Because the tempo & cadence workouts are pretty short, I’ve been able to go hard during them and I’m forcing myself to go faster as the workouts get easier. I  think I need to do a test 5K at someone point during training and see if I really am improving. That’d alleviate my concerns about the slow, plodding easy runs I’m doing on the weekends.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve done pretty well avoiding added sugar (with the exception of the Diocesan Convention — oh my those brownies were gooood!). The one area I haven’t been able to avoid added sugar is in bready things. But that’s a pretty minimal amount of sugar, so I’m calling it good. My diet still needs a lot of work, but I managed to lose weight over the winter last year; there’s no reason to think I can’t do it again.

Today is supposed to be a cross-training workout. I really need to get back into the habit of doing that core workout. The swimming will help, but so far I’ve only managed to do that a couple of times. Ideally, I’d swim twice a week, do a core workout twice a week, and run three days a week. There’s really no reason why I can’t do a core workout in my office at lunch – except that I’m usually goofing off on Facebook or writing my blog at lunch – and doing a shorter, more focused workout at lunch would mean I’m less likely to be sore the next day. (Sometimes swimming the day after a core workout is just too much.) I think I’m falling into this trap of thinking it’s not worth to do a short workout, and that leads me to do no workout. *sigh*