Week of 4/22 - 4/28

Nothing too fantastic happened running-wise this week. I put in @ 5+ miles on Wed. On Thursday, I ran to work, ran to the Guthrie Green Bootcamp, ran after the bootcamp, then ran home. In total @13 miles for the day. I ran on Saturday @ 5+ miles and then on Sunday, I followed up with @ 12 (mix of road and trail).

I did break down and buy a pair of shoes. Saucony Adapt xt-600. They were $30 at Marshalls. I have not run in them yet. They are designed as trail shoes, so I'm not sure if I'll to road miles in them, but I did do alot of trail miles in my previous Addidas and they were made for roads.

As far as how my body is feeling, I'd give this week a C- rating. Thursday I felt kinda junky with pain in my hips and feet. Today (Sunday) my left knee started to hurt at the beginning of my run and my left heel started to feel kinda numb later in the run. I may have to rethink mixing trail and road running in the same run. So right now, I'm feeling some soreness in my left heel. Nothing terrible, but it is an indication of doing too much.  Thus, I will rationalize this by taking a break tomorrow and giving my feet a rest. I am contemplating not running until Thursday and supplementing with some cross-training. I feel like I'm neglecting some other areas of my health that could use some attention. In all likelihood, my foot will feel passable tomorrow and I'll be back on the trail Tues. for the Night Crawlers run. If I do that, I'll make sure to bring water.

What I would like to have the discipline for is to rest for an entire week. I think I can do that. I just need to make it happen. It needs to make sense in my mind first. That if I take the time off, that my running will get better and stronger as a result. It's a good plan, it's just sticking to it and not straying where the problem arises. But writing this out now kinda helps.

In the same breath as that thought, I work on the idea of 20 miles in 3 hours. Today I ran 7 miles in 1 hour and I think that I can maintain that pace for a longer duration. The course that I am thinking of is from my house to Hunter Park and back. It is the same course that I ran 20 miles barefoot on. I did that in 4 hours, but I had adopted a run 45/walk 15 strategy for that run. For the next one, I'd just run the whole way. I think that I can do it. It will give me an idea of what my marathon time would be like. Once I get this done, I'll start  to look at a slightly longer course and plan out the full marathon distance. I'll give voice to my ambitions here and say that I would like to complete a sub-four hour marathon. That is what I am training for at least, but it is a long way off. If I can get a handle on my heels and condition myself for the distance, I think that sub-four is a doable goal. Right now I'm still in the long slow distance portion of my training.

There are only 209 days until the Route 66 Marathon.

Ran 3 laps at the Keystone Lake trails. Each lap is @4.4 miles. Tomorrow will be a rest day. I ran at a   decent pace, but I did fall twice on the final lap, banged up my knee a bit, but not too bad. I am becoming a bigger fan of chocolate milk for recovery. When I was feeling fatigued, I whipped up a chocolate milk shake and it stood me up pretty good. Now I gotta stretch.

Didn't do too much in the way of mileage this week. I ran 15+ miles on Saturday and then rested my feet for a couple days. I ran 6 miles at work on Tuesday and 6 miles in the evening during the Boston Marathon Memorial Run. That was probably the fastest that I have ever run for that distance. I started off at a moderate pace and slowly worked my way toward the front of the pack. I was running behind a couple girls for most the way. After about the first mile, two guys split off and started running a quicker pace. I was content to stick with the pace that I was going, so the two guys went off into the distance.  At the turn around, the two guys were joined by some other folks in the run. These people did not go the whole turn around distance, they just waited for the two guys to come by and then kept pace with them. I however, continued to run with the two girls with the fast group in sight. We ran for about another mile and one of the girls said she had to back off the pace, so she fell back and I was with the faster of the two. I asked her if she wanted to close the gap on the fast group. She said she just wanted to run and whatever happened was OK with her, that she didn't want to race. I told her that running in a group requires less effort, which was my motivation. Again, she just wanted to run. Eventually we caught up to the fast group and hung with them until the end. I never really felt fatigued, but when we stopped I hit the water fountain and panted for a bit. Then I headed off to my truck and drove to Wal-Mart for motor oil and chocolate milk. It was a good day.

The next day my legs were sore, but nothing too terrible. I did a low-key lunch time work out which focused on elevated handstands and a little bit of barefoot running. Nothing too strenuous. Guthrie Green bootcamp was the next day and during the run with Raj afterwards, I had to stop because my calves were locking up, much tension. I had planned on running in to work on Friday, but opted to ride my bike and give my legs/feet a rest. I felt kinda junky and did not want to exacerbate my issues.

Today is Saturday morning. I don't know if I'll run today, but I would like to get out to the Keystone trails and try to run 3 laps in 2 hours.

OK, so running @ 70 miles in 10 days, for me, was not a good idea. Especially when 17 of the last 22 miles was done with a #24 pack. Actually, after the first 50 or so, I was not so bad, but then, of course, I decided to stretch it out a bit and run a long day with extra weight. Then a couple days later I made another unwise decision to run @10 miles barefoot along the river trail. That kinda sealed the deal and foot pain ensued. The morning after the 10 mile run, I was able to walk, but I did not have an unencumbered full range of motion. On my walk with the dogs, I worked to find the areas where my feet were not working right and see if I could induce discomfort to understand where I needed help. Well, as is typical of my feet and my approach, my heels were hurting. I found that when I stepped, I did not want to flex my foot at the point of lift-off. I wanted to keep my heel rigid. So I picked up my foot, plantar flexed and then took a couple steps. Yep, sure enough that was a pain inducer. I repeated that a couple times and the pain diminished a bit, but never completely went away. I also had some pain in my left knee. It was not a persistent problem, but came and went.

That was Sunday (3/31) and now today my feet are feeling better after having some rest. I can still feel some weakness and tension in my left heel. If I stretch my foot, I can engage it and feel the problem in there. My plan is to run a little tomorrow as a diagnostic run, to see how the healing is going.

My hope is that I will learn when I am pushing myself too far and when it's OK to keep applying pressure. I am trying to take recovery more seriously as a necessary and integral part of my running.

22 mile day

Today I got in about 22 miles of running. I did 6.9 to work, 5.5 (barefoot) at lunch and 9.8 home. 17+ of those miles was carrying my #24 backpack. Needless to say the pace was slow, but I was wanting to work on consistency and that's what I got, lots of time to work on consistency. Tomorrow will be a rest day.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. v2.0

After thinking about the start of the IAO run, I thought that it would be better to start it at the River West Festival Park which can be seen via: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=5855539 .

This way there would be no need for road closures during the event and there is a lot of parking available in that area.

50+ mile week

Just a quick word. I was able to get out and run around Turkey Mountain this morning for about an hour and 1/2. Not sure how much distance I covered, but I know that I am well over the 50+ mile range for the week, which for me is a first.

The Midnight Madness 50 mile run is coming up at the end of June (http://www.tatur.org/Midnight50/index.html). I won't be a participant, but I will probably go out to volunteer or something like that. So those folks run in under 15 hours what I did in 7 days. Actually, the top place finisher did it in 7:25 last year. I'm sure some folks have done it faster. For me, I'd like to do this event next year, but I'll have to put in the hours of training and a bunch of longer runs to get me to where I can do my thing and not injure/cripple myself in the process. I hold a vision in my head of participating in a 100 mile event some day, but that would have to be off in the more distant future. Currently, the longest that I have run is for about 5 hours, I would have to be able to run/walk for @30 - 40 hours, depending on the course and my level of fitness and training. Yeah, that's still a ways off.

Tomorrow is a rest day and then well see about what Tuesday looks like for runs into work. I will be oncall next week, so I'll have to add a laptop and BlackBerry to my pack. Usually my pack (work clothes, lunch, towel, etc....) is in the #15 - #18 range, with the laptop it will push it close to #25. I don't know if I'll be able to do the long run route, but I should be able to get in the regular distance.  We'll see how this unfolds.