Active recovery?

Rest days?.. Don't like 'em. But I certainly understand the need to put down the heavy things from time to time and give the ol bod a rest.. We call it 'active recovery', and I can get behind a phrase like that! Last week our active recovery day was a 5k row.. Not my favorite thing, but definitely a good thing for me to do. I noticed that once you do a longer row a time or 2, all the other distances that come up in a workout seem much less intimidating, so that's a good thing! It's also good to learn how your paces change based on the distances. This week, our active recovery was a 5k run, which I tackled this morning..after I did about 30 minutes of moderate weight overhead squats and snatches.. I know, I know.. I shouldn't lift on my active recovery day.. But.. I needed just that little bit of work. Since Monday wasn't a great snatch day, I needed a more solid day of snatching before we likely head in to next week, where we aim to match or surpass our max. So anyway, I did that little bit of lifting and felt pretty good about it, then quickly turned in to 'fluorescent runner girl' and set out for the 5k! I decided to do the run from the gym VS going home to run because I have found that it's easier to stay in 'workout mode' at the gym, where if I drove home to run, I may not have been in the mood to run as hard.. Maybe it's just me? But I wanted to try to run it hard and didn't want any excuses.. But this meant I was going to have to run in the dark and in kind of a commercial/industrial area where cars can be moving pretty quick and aren't used to runners on that road. Luckily, though, JD decided he wanted to run and that he would stick with me, since I had the watch to tell us the distance and time.. Excellent! JD is a good runner, so he would definitely be able to push me on the pace. Also excellent because he had the idea to get off that road and take a back entrance to the large Lowes/Walmart parking lot where we can run around there with less worry of being hit by a car. Though running circles around large stores isn't exactly scenic, it was still dark, so who cares.. It was safe and didn't require running almost 30 laps around our building, so I was happy. Even though I may not be quite as fast as I have been in the past when I was doing more of it, I still found the run quite enjoyable. I pushed as hard as I could and I think it was a good test of my current running abilities. We managed a 23:15 finish, which I think is about a 7:46 avg pace? Not amazing, but not bad. I'm sure JD could have gone faster, so it was good to have him along to keep me moving. My amazing tunes also kept me moving! It's been way too long since I've listened to my iPod! (I just had it in 1 ear for safety and to not completely ignore my running partner.. I felt bad I couldn't share my tunes with him, because they were delightful!) So now that we have a solid test to pull from, my goal for the next time I run a 5k will be to hold under a 7:40 pace to finish somewhere in the 22:xx range.. Hopefully I can find some time to work on my running pace and plan for a repeat challenge in the next few weeks. Yay, running!