Day 25: Forcing it
After my interval training yesterday I put on both of my probably-inappropriate knee braces, in a misguided effort to pressure my legs into functioning properly. Each of the last two times I’ve adopted semi-serious running plans I’ve bought a knee brace, without asking for advice, because I am overly proud and stubborn about asking salespeople for help and looking like an idiot who doesn’t know what she’s doing. This is a bad strategy, I recognize. So the first time I bought some overly expensive Nike thing that’s like a little knob on a strap that you tighten around your knee. I never used it because it intimidated me. And then I lost it and bought a cheap elastic Ace brace that looks like a semi-structured Ace bandage. It came in sizes, so I picked large, thinking that this was unisex and seriously my knees aren’t giant, right? But it’s still quite tight on my knee, so when I wear it and then sit in a way that puts a little extra pressure on my knee I always feel like I’m close to cutting off circulation. Anyway. And then I found the Nike one again. So yesterday I put both of these things on — again, I have no idea what I’m doing (it only just now occurred to me to search for “best knee brace” online [side note: if I didn’t work at Google, where “google” as a verb is verboten, would I have just typed “google” instead of “search for”? One wonders]), but it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Ace brace I stuck on the left leg to address the aforementioned just-above-the-knee-pain and the other one I put on the right for the just-below-the-knee pain. The Nike thing seemed to work, but I was too distracted by the potential loss of circulation in the other leg to really be able to tell. At any rate, I took them both off, wiggling around trying to do it while wearing jeans, at Toronado yesterday evening, and by the time I left there I had had just enough beer to make me feel not crippled.
Enter Thursday, and today I am hobbling around like an old person or a person who has already run a half-marathon — like, recently, and not yet recovered. I remind myself of Dan after he ran the Portland marathon and came back and wanted to take a cab from our house (21st and Valencia, basically) to Matt and Anna’s (25th and Dolores). To be fair, there were hills. But it was eye-opening. How did this happen, I ask you?! In skimming the last week’s of blog entries, I don’t really remember pushing myself so hard or feeling so sore as to deserve this (until yesterday). Where did I cross the invisible line into a world of pain?
I spent all of today wondering whether I should even run at all and trying to determine whether I was in pain due to joints or IT bands or something or if I was just really sore. Or both. Mostly, I was just really sore, and I reminded myself (and so did my boss, and the specter of my personal trainer) that I should run to work through the lactic acid. But oh I did not want to. Finally, I asked Peattie, who told me I should, rationalizing that someone who is ramping up her mileage and such as fast as I am (vs. doing what he would do, running the same distance a couple times a week for two weeks or so until I felt comfortable, then upping it, etc.) is going to be running sore more often than she is running not sore. Harrumph. Then, after I had finally committed myself to the cause, I took out my iPod to update it with my brand-new, finally finished running mix and the dang thing froze up. When I restarted it, I realized it had about 8% of its battery, and it being old-school and a hand-me-down, that means about 30 seconds of listen time. Double harrumph. I left it charging/syncing and dragged myself out to run without it, fantasies of new iPod shuffles dancing in my head like proverbial sugarplums.
The run was… painful. All new parts of my body started to hurt for the first time, from my left shin to my right calf just above the ankle to my left lower back. (I suspect this has to do with flaws in my form?) Mostly I was just… sore, sore, sore. And after the soreness started to dissipate, I felt all the other little twinges come back. To quote myself in an entirely different context, “everything was not okay.” But… I did run the full 3.5 miles anyway. My reward was seeing three lizards, a jack rabbit in the distance and a lot of geese and goslings of different ages. And discovering that when running outside in a nice breeze, not having an iPod isn’t so bad.
One thing I think I’ve realized so far in this process is that I am pretty darn stubborn. I think that because I am pretty easy-going at work (and known as such), I tend to forget that aspect of my personality, or at least, not to expect it in new areas of life. But I’ve been pretty hardheaded about training so far, meaning that I don’t like taking shortcuts and I don’t like missing days or changing my plans. I think that’s mostly a good thing, but I do wonder if it could get me in trouble at any point — like if I push it when I should rest, or something. Just a few minutes after my run, I was heading to the shuttle and truly struggling going down the stairs. The impact on that left hip area was not fun. (I don’t know if it’s a hip flexor issue, by the way. That’s the obvious guess, but it doesn’t feel like pain in the front of the hip, which is where hip flexor pain should be. It’s more in the back, and somehow underneath. Like where you’d get hip pressure walking down stairs.) Should I keep it up, or somehow scale back a little bit for the next week until I feel better? I do think that instead of intervals next week I’ll do some true cross-training, to give my knees a break. But besides that, I don’t know. In the back of my mind, there’s this thought that all kinds of athletes tend to do things when they are somewhat injured or recovering. Are there benefits to that, or am I comparing myself to the wrong people? I can’t decide.
At any rate, I get a break tomorrow, since I just have plain ol’ personal training. (Freudian slip, I typed “pain ol’” at first and didn’t notice!) In the meantime, it’s ibuprofen — and maybe a couple glasses of wine — for me. That, and thinking about how best to approach my long run this weekend.
Summary:
- 3.74 miles (route)
- 41:23 minutes
- 5.24mph
