I think part of the reason I've been slacking off a little bit is that my training was too structured for too long. I'll get back to it eventually, but sometimes you need to just be free to do what you want. Today, I decided to go a bit farther than normal to make up for lack of running yesterday. I also decided I wanted to do it at speeds that are close to my goal time for the half-marathon. I ended up doing 7.3 miles in 1:05:10 for an average pace of 8:55 (details), which I'm pretty happy with. I think I could've gone farther while maintaining that pace, but I didn't bring any hydration or gels, and I was pretty dehydrated by that point.
As I'm typing this, it's crazy for me to compare my current ability to the running I could do even 6 months ago. The Crazylegs 8k (4.99 miles) was about 5.5 months ago and I barely broke a 9:00 pace for that. If I were to run 7+ miles back then, I would have been lucky to break a 10:00 average pace. Now, I still had some gas left in the tank and was able to achieve under a 9:00 pace.
My wife and I just signed up for a membership at Fitness 19, so there will be no excuses about it being too cold to run or anything this winter. I also have set forth a minimum distance of 5 miles outside per week over the winter. I had some setbacks in transitioning from treadmill to pavement last spring, and I want to try to avoid that next year.
All in all, I think the lull is over. With the half-marathon coming up, I think I'm in a good place as far as motivation goes. Hopefully I won't have a lull after the race, but I think I'll have to plan another race (perhaps the Polar Dash and some others) to make sure I keep training.
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