Running Post

Sorry to those of you who hate running because here's a post all about it! For those of you new to my life, about a year ago, I started training for a marathon. I had a bump early on in the road as I dealt with the swine flu and the bronchitis/pneumonia that followed. But once I had finally kicked that away, training went quite smoothly for quite some time. Then about 6 weeks ago after a big week of mileage increase, my foot went on strike. I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with it, but there's a spot under the little pokey bone that sticks out on your ankle (how's that for a medical term) that got super painful - so painful that I couldn't put much weight at all on my foot for almost a week and was hobbling around on crutches - we were fearing a stress fracture. Talk about sadness! But after two weeks of total rest and several weeks of partial rest, it was feeling better. Not at 100%, but I was able to run on it. My marathon hopes had revived enough to make me think I could get it done. This past week, I had some more pain there again - not like at first because I'm super paranoid now about any little tweak or anything and have cut back on my mileage. So I was feeling pretty bummed out this week wondering if I would even be able to do the marathon since it is only 6 weeks away and my highest mileage run has only been 14 miles.

Today's long run was supposed to be 19 miles. I knew there was no way I could run that far with the way my foot was feeling so I was unsure on what to do. I decided I would just play it by ear on my long run today depending on how my foot felt. I ended doing an interval-type long run. I started off running two miles at a time and then walking one in between. My foot was hurting towards the middle of the second mile on those, so I decided to cut it back to run one, walk one. I ended up covering 16 miles that way. I was so pleased and happy. I was even having fun if you can believe that! It makes me feel like if I do something like that for the marathon that I will get it done. It obviously won't be fast, but with what I did today, I averaged about 12:30 miles - which I didn't think was too bad considering I walked 7 out of the 16 miles. I am filled with hope for this marathon now. I think I can do it! Yea for an encouraging run! I needed that. And to top it off, while I was out running, my dear husband cleaned up the house for me, so there's one less thing to need to do today. Yea! Now it's time to go and listen to the Hawks kick the Cyclones butt in football. Go Hawks!