Dear Spring, I Heart You.

Today was the most beautiful day ever.  Well....  It ended up being beautiful after a co-worker and I spent 25 minutes bitching about how the weather report was calling for sun shiny amazingness all week, and we had yet to see it.  It's amazing how much of a difference great weather makes for your runs.  I had an easy 3 miles on the schedule and felt like I was effortless flying.  It was great.  I ran 3.02 miles in 25:45 for an average pace of 8:32/mile.  Definitely not an "easy" pace, but I swear it felt easy.  

Speaking of easy paces, that's something I really struggle with and would appreciate any and all suggestions on:  I struggle with what paces to run my training runs at.  Right now I'm training for a 5K.  My best time was about a month ago of 25:48 (8:19 avg. pace).  I would like to get down to sub 8 minute mile pace.  I will be starting my half marathon training in mid-June.  My best time is 2:07, and am shooting for somewhere in the range of 1:55-2 hours for the one I'm doing in September.  When I try to use the Runners World website for training plans with paces calculated they seem really off.  Anyway, any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.  :)

In other exciting news,  I was talking to one of the boyfriend's friend's fiance (follow that all right??) about my training and she offered to help me out with some tweaks to my next training plan and joining me for some of my speed work runs.  I went to college with this chica, and she is amazing.  Nationally ranked in cross country for division 2 and the steeplechase, 3000 m & 5000 m for track.  Seriously I wish I knew some better and more exact stats on her, because this small blurb is not even close to doing her justice, but that would be kind of creepy of me to do that without her knowledge, so I won't.  :)  Obviously she has benefited from some great coaching, and is just naturally a gifted athlete, so I'm super excited to use her expertise.  Plus it'll be nice to have someone else to blab about running too.