Happy Easter!

Hope everyone is having a hoppy Easter! :) I miss the days I could be with my family on Easter, instead of stuck inside of a building, feeding cells and making figures for a paper...
It appears that Mother Nature decided to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ by locking forcing Jack Frost to call it a season away and finally letting Spring, in all its glory, flourish. It seriously seemed like winter was just not willing to call it quits this year. After coming back from DC, I actually had to pull my plants back inside, as there was snow on the ground Monday morning. But while this week started out cold, rainy and gloomy, the end of the week was much more appealing. It was actually warm enough to run without a shirt on these last couple of days! The one disadvantage of spring: the red-winged black birds have returned. While they haven't felt that they needed to dive bomb at my head just quite yet, I have a feeling that this docile nature that they are displaying is just a temporary disposition, and that they will return to their aggressive, pain-in-the-a** ways once they start laying eggs...
Training-wise, things are going okay, but not great. Since it was cold and windy last Friday, with a chance of storms, I decided to forgo running the 5k at Eastern. This is because 1) I didn't want to get to the meet and end up having driven all that way to find out that the meet was canceled due to the threat of storms, and 2) if I'm going to run a 5k on the track, I want it to be fast. I didn't feel like the forecasted conditions Friday night looked promising for a fast time. Despite these worries, I think the weather out in Ypsilanti ended up being more or less okay, as Damon and Adam ran close to their PRs... In lieu of running the race, I did a fartlek the next day. I can't really say that it was a very high quality workout; I've been feeling kind of tired lately, and haven't been sleeping the best (this has improved the last couple nights), so I was finding it kind of hard to get geared up to do a quality workout. Its frustrating not having done a workout in weeks that shows me that I'm in good shape. Outside of a couple of good hill workouts, I feel like below average workouts has been the theme of this spring. Its not all doom and gloom, however, as my normal training runs have steadily been getting faster, and, for the most part, I've been killing it on long runs. Part of me wonders if I'm working too hard on my easy days, leaving me taxed for workouts and races (although I've set a couple of PRs this spring, I don't think that those races were necessarily representative of the shape I'm in. I think I'm capable of much more). The thing is, I don't feel like I'm pushing my easy days. Heck, even  some of my long runs in which I average under six-minute-mile pace, I feel like I'm just out for a jog. Today, for instance, I went out for my long run, sans Garmin, with the intention of just logging the miles. I ended up running 5:58 pace for 16.76 miles without knowing what kind of pace I was running the entire time. I did push it the last ten minutes, but for this to really make a difference, I would already have to be pretty close to six minute pace for the rest of the run... I guess if anyone has any thoughts on the matter, your advice would be appreciated. I really would like to have a decent workout this week...
Speaking of this week, its Gina Relays time! The last couple of years I've been a honorary Hillsdale alum, running a leg on their alumni 4x8 team. :) However, it appears that this year I'm going to break away from this tradition. Instead, I'm planning/hoping to crank out a solid 5k before running a leg on a Playmakers 4x8 team (currently consisting of me, Jake, Jason Bigelow, and Damon). So that's the plan...