Week 4 is in the bag...

Oh yeah! I finished week 4 this afternoon. It was a difficult one for me. I was feeling quite confident so I decided to pick up the pace a little bit. I decided to finish my round trip 3 minutes faster than I normally do. Well let's just say that about three quarters of a the way through my run I realized that I was a little off pace to meet my goal. So I picked it up to make up some time. Well needless to say that was probably a big mistake about a quarter mile away from my run I was dragging tail all the way back to the end. I finished about 40 seconds off my goal. Usually I would feel good about coming so close to my goal, especially since I ran my circuit faster than ever before. But I didn't feel good after this run. I felt extremely drained. No runner's high. No great feeling of accomplishment. Just complete and total exhaustion. But now, about 3 hours later, I'm just really happy that I've finished week 4. Week 5 is a challenge that I'm looking forward to, but at the same I'm very leery of the 3rd workout. For those who are not familiar with coolrunning.com's couch to 5k program, here's the issue. For the past 4 weeks I've been running intervals increasing my running intervals from 1 minute to 5 minutes. Well starting next week the intervals increase to 8 minutes. Not too bad, just an increase of 3 minutes per interval from last week. But on the 3rd workout I'm supposed to just run 20 minutes straight without any walk breaks! Talk about a mental test! But I've talked to other on the message boards that have done the workout and the tell me that even though it is a very tough challenge it is doable. So I'll keep focused and take next week's challenge head-on. I'll keep you updated.