American River Parkway Half Marathon Training Week 11: 3/20-3/26

Another great week of training for the American River Parkway half marathon next month! I got in all my workouts and this week was even better because this weekend was my birthday and also the Rock'n'Roll San Francisco Half marathon. My sister came down to run it and my friend Lenora also joined in the fun. 

Here's a recap of last week's workouts following Coach Dawn's plan:

Monday 3/20 -

Scheduled: Cross Train
Actual: Cross train workout with the girls.
Tuesday 3/21 -

Scheduled: 10 min. w/u, 4x1 mile @8:00-8:10 w/ 4 min recoveries, c/d 10 min
Actual: 10 min. w/u, 4x1 mile paces @ 7:58, 8:00, 8:11, 8:12. I'm so glad my friend Lenora joined me on the run because she definitely helped push me on those last 2 repeats!! I didn't hit my paces on the last two but glad I pushed through and was close enough!
Wednesday 3/22 -
Scheduled: Rest
Actual: Rest
Thursday 3/23 -

Scheduled: 4 miles at recovery pace
Actual: 4 miles at recovery pace
Friday 3/24 -

Scheduled: 3 miles easy w/ a few short strides
Actual: 3 easy birthday miles with friends, forgot about the strides.
Saturday 3/25 -
Scheduled: Rest
Actual: Rest
Sunday 3/26 -

Scheduled: RnRSF Half - This should be a great training run with the hills! I would suggest running this pretty comfortable and enjoying it. You don’t want to push too hard on the hills since you aren’t training on them. You could do it as a sort of fartlek run and push a few short hills, then recover. You can also practice some downhill strides to get the leg turnover going. On the flats, I would suggest staying at no faster than 8:50 pace. And the hilly parts, just run slow enough to sustain a steady pace, walk some if you need to.
Actual: 13.1 miles average pace 8:55. I was hoping to do no faster than 8:50 pace on the flats but that didn't happen since I wanted to stick with my sister and my friend Lenora. It turned out ok although I worked harder than I thought I would, it was still fun! Look out for my race recap on the blog hopefully later this week!

So the weekend started with my birthday on Friday. Hubby surprised me with flowers and donuts. :) 

 We then had a yummy sushi dinner. So good!

 I was happy spending my birthday with the boys and Hubby.

On Saturday my sister drove in. We ate a quick lunch at home then picked up my friend Lenora before driving to San Francisco for the Rock'n'Roll half marathon expo. We were hoping to make the #werunsocial meetup but unfortunately missed it due really bad traffic. We missed the big group but still managed to see fellow #runderfulrunners, Laura and Ross from Twitter.

Afterwards we ended up at La Mar for dinner. Such yummy Peruvian food. We of course had to get some yummy drinks. 

We all also got the lomo saltado. So so good. I definitely recommend this place if you are ever in San Francisco.

After dinner, we headed straight to our hotel since the race was to start so early the next morning. A 6:15 start time meant we had to call it a night pretty early. The race was definitely worth the early wake up time. More about the race will be in my upcoming recap, however I will say that it was an awesome time especially since I got to run it with these two.

Hubby and the kiddos, along with my sister's husband and her kids met up with us for lunch after the run. We ended up getting some dim sum in China Town. Then we went to Fort Mason to walk around. Got this shot of me and Hubby by the flowers.

 A nice shot from the pier.

We also walked to Ghirardelli chocolate and got some treats. I ended up with a waffle cone with chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. :)

We will be in the LA area this week, so we'll be doing a couple of runs in new territory. It should be fun! That pretty much sums up my week! Linking this post up with HoHo Runs and MissSippiPiddlin for their Weekly Wrap. 

Have a great week!