Recovering from this morning’s 19-miler (first five before the sun came up, ugh), with coffee and catching up on a week’s worth of posts from the various running blogs I follow, I noticed a trend: many stories about snow-running related tweaks or recurrences of old injuries, etc. It’s a catch 22 – running on the snow and ice (up and down these darned New Hampshire hills!) changes your gait, and you get tweaked. But changing up too many of your runs to a treadmill if you’re mainly an outdoor runner can do the same thing. I’ve been opting for the streets. I’m trying to go easy (despite Hyannis looming and me being nowhere near the condition I was hoping to be in at this point) since I’m wrangling with the same sorts of injuries everyone else is talking about. In particular for me it’s the plantar fasciitis. Nowhere near as bad as the time I had it about 10 years ago, but bad enough. I took an unusual three rest days this week and bought some good quality arch supports earlier in the week and the combination seems to be doing the trick. I ran a quick 3.75 miler in them yesterday and felt good enough to tackle today’s long run with the inserts in (though I carried my standard insoles along with me, just in case). The inserts held up great and mitigated almost all of pain from the plantar fasciitis – my arches proved to be the least of my worries. Instead, I think I ate too little yesterday (picked the wrong day to start my pre-race diet), and as a result felt like I had nothing left in the tank by mile nine! That made the next ten beastly. I felt like I was running through mud with lead legs, and sucking wind up every one of the interminable and numerous hills. The upside was getting to the end and seeing that I’d only backed off the pace that the rest of my long run group was running by 15 seconds or a mile. It had felt like I was running 12s and instead I finished at an overall 8:29 average. This turns out to be a nice confidence boost at a time when, like I said, I feel like I’m behind where I should be, or at least want to be, for Hyannis. Between a busy family and work schedule, bad weather during most of my long runs (tough on the legs), and nagging injuries, I was starting to doubt I was getting anywhere at all – wondering if maybe I was slipping backwards. If maybe I should swap down to the half-marathon distance at Hyannis (yeah, I thought it). But the truth is, if I measure a workout like today’s against my training for last summer Portland, I can see improvements in the baseline, and continue to hold out hope for improving on my time in that race. And with the long run group keeping me motivated on Saturday mornings, and the potential to lose a few pounds between now and the race to give my speed a boost, optimism lives.
Tags: Hyannis, marathon, Running, winter
I live on optimism. Even when I don’t have any basis for it.
What else can you do! But there’s always a basis for home, if not an expectation…
We share the bond of winter training pains. I hope you’ve got your PF recurrence under control. I am struggling with right knee ‘issues’ that I attribute to slipping and sliding in snow and ice, especially when trying to climb the hills.
Run strong at Hyannis! You write a wonderful blog, which I will be following. Thanks for your encouraging comments on my blog.