Hello friends! Long time no post!
One of the reasons I stopped blogging in Fall of 2019 was because I was REALLY GOOD at starting new blog posts and also REALLY BAD at finishing them & getting them up. Turns out, the more things change, the more they they stay the same, sigh.
But also a lot has happened since my last post, sooooo in the interest of trying to not completely disappear into the void again, I'm going to try to just post *some* kind of update, even if it is short and incomplete. So here ya go, a lightening recap of the last, oh, six weeks or so:
(1) I went to the UK in early September for work! A few days after I arrived in London the Queen died and I am trying not to take it personally or worry too much about the coincidence. I had the worst jet lag of my life plus a realllly busy conference & as a result did almost zero running but tooonnnnssss of walking. Like, so much walking. More walking than I may have ever done in an eight-day span ever before in my life. So much walking that when I finally did get some running in, it felt terrible. Just terrible.
(2) I came back home to SF and ran a 40+ training week, including a 14+ mile workout and an 18-mile long run, my longest run since the Big Sur Marathon in 2018. It felt fine at the time, but by Tuesday I was starting to have some mild but concerning pain in my left ankle/tibia that I kept questioning whether I should really be running through.
(3) After six days in my own bed, I went to Canada for work! The day after arriving, I attempted an interval workout on the hotel treadmill; each interval got steadily more painful until I said "You know what, this is crap" & just stopped. That was the end of running for me for a while, but unfortunately NOT the end of tons and tons of walking, which, you guessed it, made things worse.
(4) I flew directly from Canada to Southern California for a week of three, count 'em THREE work conferences. By this point I was straight-up limping but still had to do a ton of conference-related walking. The silver lining was that I had access to hotel gyms with elliptical trainers so I was able to get a few elliptical workouts in which does I dunno, maybe more than nothing for cardio??
(5) I came home, rested up, and started to feel a bit better. After two days completely off, I was walking fine with no pain. My team needed a third masters runner to score in Oct. 2's Urban Cow Half Marathon, and I said that if my leg felt okay, I would participate, in that I would show up and travel by foot in some form or fashion from the start to the finish. After four easy miles on Friday and three easy miles on Saturday with no pain, I thought, great, I can do this!
(6) I ran Urban Cow on Oct. 2 and even managed to run the first few miles at marathon goal pace! Unfortunately somewhere around mile 5 or 6 I pulled my right hamstring (the same one that had been such a problem for me in 2021) & finished the rest at a pretty moderate pace. On the plus side, our masters team got second, so it felt like it was worth it!
Urban Cow Half Marathon, 1:47:11
(7) I did a couple of short, easy runs later in that week, then woke up one morning limping, which was, once again, the end of running for a while. The pain in my left medial tibia kept getting worse, though it did not feel like a bone injury in that it was always worst in the morning and got better over the course of the day, and there was no single spot that was particularly tender; it was just kind of achey along a six-inch span, & the only serious pain was with weight-bearing, and more when taking weight off the leg than putting weight on it. In any case, I knew there was no point in trying to run at all until I had absolutely no pain walking. I don't know if it's *actually* a stress reaction, but I'm kind of treating it that way regardless.
(8) The limping went on until this past Thursday (10/13) when I was finally able to walk pain-free. On Thursday I walked 20 minutes and on Friday 30 minutes, which all felt great.
(9) We went to Paso Robles last weekend! It was a great time as always, and a good distraction from not being able to do much running-wise.
L'Aventure in Paso Robles
Thomas Keller dinner at Lone Madrone Winery!
(10) This past Monday (10/17) I ran/walked to my gym (1:00 run, 4:00 walk) and back, and by 'run' I mean 'shuffle conservatively with the tiniest imaginable sliver of suspension', which hey! Didn't hurt! I figured if running is going to be pretty limited for a while, it's a good opportunity to take advantage of the unlimited small-group lifting classes at my gym and make sure I keep all the things strong.
And....that pretty much brings us to now. The name of the game is pretty much increasing the amount of running suuuuuper slowly and decreasing if there is *any* pain during or after, until whatever it is that's been unhappy is once again able to tolerate the load.
You may be thinking, "Wait, hey, didn't you have some races on the calendar, including CIM?" Well, yes, and I think it's pretty obvious that trying to run a marathon six weeks from now would be a pretty dumb thing to do. So that's out. I still have three weeks before the Indy Monumental half, so we'll see whether I can heal up fast enough to make that even a remote possibility (though, even if I am able to run it, it will obviously NOT be for speed).
It's all kind of shitty, obviously, but the plus side is that trying to train through the holidays is always kind of annoying, and there's no reason why I can't spend the rest of the year healing up & ramping up my easy running, then target some bigger races in the spring.
I really feel like all the time on the road was what got me into this mess in the first place (tons of sitting, walking in not-great shoes, less than ideal sleep, and generally being out of my strength/prehab/mobility routines) and I just need to avoid having so many long and/or logistically complex trips so close together.
So yeah -- most of my posting for the rest of the year will probably be mostly recovery/rehab stuff, womp womp. But hopefully I'll find some fun stuff to post as well. :)
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