185 miles in one month! How did I do that??

        I can't believe I am looking at my monthly total mileage and it is 185 miles! That is 85 miles over my 100 mile/month goal. I have only missed 7 days of running all month and it has been fun, pain-free runs. I have run some trails, some roads. I have run with a friend or two and I have run many runs alone. I have run without music/with music/with podcasts or just listening to the red-winged blackbirds trilling along the clear creek trail. There have been times I did not want to take a run but I went out the door anyway and you know what? partway through I decided I didn't want to be doing anything BUT running.
     I mostly heart rate trained it. This is my third month of heart rate training and I really think it is making a difference. Yes my runs take longer. Yes I sometimes get frustrated or even embarrassed when I have to walk up a little hill or, even worse, a downhill. But I take it seriously because I see changes. I see results! I have lost body fat and lost weight. I feel better about my running and my workouts show that.
      I take heart rate training so seriously that when my GPS watch started to have a nervous breakdown on me and say stupid things like my pulse was 39 on a Paynetown uphill I said LIAR and sent it back where it came from so I  bought another monitor from a friend. Even though I had lost some bells and whistles such as GPS, etc....the heart rate was the most important thing to me. Now my monitor says more sensible things although that means I have to walk more. Sometimes I get to having such a great time and I forget to check it (I still haven't figured out how to get it to chime when it gets over my heart rate so I have to look at it from time to time) and it will be 148 and I will have to stop dead in my tracks and start walking......sometimes fuming as my little runner's high dissipates.
     Also I have been doing pyramids in the weight room and that is making a difference overall. Last week I did a pyramid at the bench press: I started at 5X85 then did 8X80 then 10X75. I finished off with 20X45. I like doing them that way because you first get the strength/power move and then move into the endurance. . On the dumbbell chest press I am up to 25 pound dumbbells and 15 on the flys. On the rows I have finally gotten past the 70 pounds mark and am up to 85. The squats I do a pyramid as well: start off 5X105, 5X110 then when I am fatigued I increase it to 115 and do that as many times as I can. An aside: in the last month the guys in the weight room have started to "little bit" accept me. One even asked me to spot a chest press for him. Kind of cool.
   For core work I have started some intense stuff in the last two/three months. I have done high-intensity moves that work me harder while needing less overall time to do. That's good news for a busy person.
   I like to do my stability ball crunches holding a 10lb. weight plate. I can get in more with 20 crunches than I could with 50 of the regular kind. I have also progressed on the TRX to where now I do planks and body saw movements with a 10 lb. weight plate on my back. Body saw 10 times back and forth and then hold a plank with the 10lbs. on as long as I can hold it. I do that perhaps 3X. Then here is my trick again. When I am fatigued with all that then I do a plank with feet on the stability ball and 20-25 knee tucks. So once again I do the power moves followed by endurance moves.
   Besides that it has been just lots of long, slow, lovely runs through the summer days and nights. Pain-free and relaxed the way running should be. Even the sucky runs are better than no runs at all.