Days 31-36
I’ve sort of fallen off the blogging game, which is fitting as I have also (sort of) fallen off the training game. By which I mean, I did not do my long run this weekend, did not run today, and may not run tomorrow. Which is not to say I’m not thinking about running or wanting to run or whatever. It’s just that running right now would be (I think) a bad idea, and I think I need to recover from what I suspect is a real, genuine injury. My left leg (from hip to knee) is just kind of messed up, is the point, and I think I need to give it a break. But, for posterity’s sake, a summary of the last few days…
Last Wednesday I did a lovely cross-training. We moved office buildings recently and it’s great because my new building has a lot of amenities, namely a little tiny gym on the first floor. It’s got maybe five treadmills and three ellipticals, including one of those crazy Precor ones that Dad really likes at his gym in Whittier. So I did that for 25 sweaty, low-impact minutes. It felt really good to go kind of easy on myself and yet still get cardio done (basically, for the past month I’ve either been running, doing straight up weight lifting with personal training, or doing light cardio/pilates at Burn. Because of all the running, personal training, which used to be a major source of pain every week, feels like a break… and Burn feels somewhere in the middle. But I also think that it might be because of Burn that my left leg is hurting… the part of my leg that is injured is also the part that, over the past month or two, actually “burned” the most during class.)
Thursday, after two days of no running post day of pain, I decided I was ready to try running again. I gave myself a break by running on the treadmill, since it’s lower impact. And it was okay. It was hard to finish. I think I ran the first two miles at around 5.7mph, and then I paused it for a few seconds to drink some water and rest my legs, and then when I picked up the speed again I couldn’t really go back up to that and finished around 5.5mph. I also find that when I start running it always really hurts, and I limp a bit before my leg starts to expect the impact again and then I can kind of make it work. But it’s not pleasant, and I did finish the 3.5 miles somewhat against my better judgment. (Summary: 38:21 minutes, 3.51 miles, 5.5mph average.) I still can’t tell where on the line I fall, in terms of “push yourself because you need to to get better sometime, and it’s not always going to feel easy, in fact it almost never will” versus “you are going to injure yourself and make it worse in the long run.” Because afterward, I found myself limping around again, and having a hard time going up and down stairs, and totally disinclined to do anything Thursday night so instead I caught up on Google Reader and watched “Definitely, Maybe” and reruns of the Office and ate cheese and crackers. Adulthood, people. It’s stimulating.
On Friday, I had canceled personal training in order to “run six miles,” but after the debacle that was Thursday I nixed that idea and did the elliptical again. (Even the elliptical sometimes feels a little iffy on that left leg, but it’s not actually painful at all.) And then I went to the Boonville beer festival, which was the opposite of exercise for everything except your liver, so that was a “rest” for two days, and today I am still limping a teeny bit (actually worse than I was over the weekend, attributable either to sleeping on the ground for two nights or some kind of psychosomatic association with work stress or many other reasons I can imagine that are probably false), so I did the elliptical again today. My concession to more aggressive training was to do the elliptical for a “distance” of four miles, which was what I was supposed to run today.
So there you have it. I’ve mixed up my training schedule this week in other ways, too — I moved Burn to Wednesday because “Mean Mommy” is teaching, and I am a glutton for punishment, plus I have this theory that her uber-athleticism (in a coach-y kind of way) will give her insight into my bum leg. And so tomorrow I guess I’ll do cross-training again, and maybe just hold off on running at all until this weekend. We’ll see.
