Still alive, mostly functional!

So, sorry if you've been refreshing this page over & over since last Friday, waiting with bated breath for a new post; it's just been a lot of drama & moodiness up in here, and no one wants a tortured, real-time play-by-play of all the ups & downs of someone else's personal drama unless the person in question is your BFF or significant other (and, let's be honest, maybe not even then). So, maybe a weekly digest of ups & downs is a little more bearable? I will try not to be too much of a drama queen.

Soup. Which I have been eating a lot of, since
I've been sick for nearly a week. BOOOO.

So I signed up for CIM at the end of August & entered the race into my RunCoach calendar, meaning I have an official training plan now (UP!). But, since my busted leg made it impossible for me to actually follow it yet, I've been doing as many of the workouts as I can manage on the elliptical at the gym by my office (DOWN). The only issues with this are that 1) I can usually only eke out an hour on the thing and 2) I'm obviously not driving to work on the weekends, so no long runs are happening right now. (Also, let's be honest; I'm not sure I could handle more than an hour on the elliptical anyway.)

Once I'd been pain-free for a week, I also started to add in little bits of running, usually around half an hour every other day or so of walk-run intervals (UP!). This was going great up until the Sunday before we left, when, the day after running, I was in a rush to get to a local store before it closed & decided to jog it. Bad idea. My left tibia started screaming at me, and I kind of limped home a little (DOWN).

At the beginning of said hike. (Read: Another excuse to post Oregon pictures.)

FINE, I thought. We were about to go on vacation anyway (UP!), where I did not intend to run at all, so for the next three days I went back to elliptical only (DOWN) & figured that that plus a solid week off should be enough to placate my whiny bone cells. Vacation was pain free (UP!), up until the second-to-last day, when Don & I, starving and ready for beer, decided to jog the last part of the trail we'd been hiking. This was fine for about five minutes and then my leg informed me that it was suddenly very NOT fine and we walked the rest (DOWN). To be fair, though, this was after six hours of hiking/climbing that day and about three hours the day before, all with no ill effects. So it may just have been too much time on my feet overall.

That was September 8th, & it hasn't hurt since (UP!). I did ~35 minutes of walk/run intervals the Saturday after we got back just to see how it felt, but since then have been sticking to the elliptical to be safe. The spot on my leg has gone from feeling like a large, swollen bruise early in September to now feeling like a very tiny bruise that's just a bit swollen, so that's progress (UP!). Still, I'd been hoping I'd be up to a 10K this Sunday, which is clearly not going to happen (DOWN). Which is just as well, since I've been sick the last few days (DOWN).

All this has made me start to feel a little antsy about CIM, seeing as that it's only 11 weeks away (which feels unsettlingly soon) and I have yet to run for even 30 minutes without walk breaks (DOWN). (I mean, I probably could. I just haven't because I'm afraid I'll wake up with pain the next day.) And also anxious because, although I can mostly do my speed/tempo & shorter runs on the elliptical as I gradually add running back in, long runs don't seem like something that's going to be happening any time soon (DOWN).

As I've said before, I think there are lots of good reasons to pay some amount of money for some amount of coaching if it's something you can do and are interested in, and one of the reasons why I think it's a good idea for me is because in situations like this, I will work myself up into a frantic mess worrying and end up scouring the internet for advice, which will inevitably all conflict. So at times like these, it's worth every penny of the $40 a month I pay to RunCoach to have pros just an email away (who, at this point, know my history fairly well & have access to three years of workout logs).

Coach Ashley was good enough to remind me that I wasn't starting a new marathon cycle from scratch and that I have a really solid foundation still from the training I did this summer, even with a few weeks of rest/elliptical only/no long runs. So I can't really think about building up to this race the way same way I would ordinarily. She said the elliptical work I've been doing so far is fine, and as long as I have 8-9 weeks of long runs to "re-sharpen", I should be in a good place for CIM. (Also not to worry about long runs at all until I can run 45 minutes with no walk breaks.)

So, that was a huge relief. Part of me was expecting them to be like, "Eek, we didn't realize it was this bad, you should probably just hope for a half in December & target NVM again in the spring." I'm going to try another ~30 minutes of walk/running on Saturday, & if all goes well, attempt to drop back into that progression while continuing the elliptical work. Hopefully within a couple of weeks I'll hit that 45 minute mark!