THE HAMMER OF KARMA

4/12/2010

It felt like I was running with scuba flippers on my feet. I wanted to give up and go home. A simple 3 mile run and it was torture. The weather was perfect, I got a full nights sleep for once, and I ate before I left. I guess some days just suck.

4/14/2010

Maybe it was the cold that I had for a week and a half that gave me preemie lungs. With the cold completely out of my system, though, I ran Baxter Preserve again, 3 miles, and my heart rate stayed in the aerobic range and I wasn't gasping for air like a someone with emphysema. It was a great run. Legs sore but strong, lungs working as they should, and a few things to keep it interesting. The first was a little swampy section where I had to choose between shoe sucking mud and pricker bushes. I went with the pricker bushes. The second interesting event was getting to watch a young girl jump a stone wall with her horse, get dumped off, and then have the horse take a 3/4 mile run before the instructor caught it. Don't worry, no head trauma, no broken bones, and she eventually saddled up and got back to it. Priceless. Oh, and I did not fall down. Yet. I'm sure the hammer of karma will visit down upon me for laughing at her (see 4/19/2010 for details).

4/17/2010

This mornings run didn't start out all that spectacularly. I decided to try doing a 4 mile run at Hemlock Hills so I headed up at about 8 am in the cold and drizzling rain. I grabbed my map at the trailhead and headed off on a trail that seemed like a pretty good loop. About 1/4 mile in the trail got unbelievably rocky, wet and steep and I couldn't get a rhythm going. I was afraid I was gonna bust my fucking head open so I eventually gave up and turned around. It's too early in my training for me to try to run on such technical terrain and I have to keep in mind that right now I'm training for a marathon and not a trail race. I figured I'd head back over to Baxter Preserve and do my "long" run there. Unlike yesterday, where there were 22 cars and some sort of dog meet going on, there was only one other wacko on the trail. I did my usual warm up and got rolling. Within a few hundred yards my feet were pretty wet from the tall grass so I knew I was in for a day of running with soaked feet. Rather than looking at that as something negative I just looked at it as training for long trail runs under somewhat lousy conditions. I've been keeping a pretty steady pace at Baxter, just a bit above 10:00/mile and I'm happy with that considering that there really are no flat sections on the entire run. There were a couple of sections that I'd never run before, sections that made this feel more like a legit trail run. There was a pretty steep rain runoff hill that lead to a dead end, a stream crossing that completely immersed my feet, a nice blood drawing whack on the achilles from a sprung branch, and some shoe sucking deep mud. I looked like a 10 year old that went out in a storm and played in the mud. AWESOME.

4/19/2010

Todays run SUCKETH. I see a trend here. Almost every Monday I have shin/achilles pain that's fucking miserable. My watch shut off (or I shut it off) so I have no idea if I ran more or less than 3 miles. I had to walk once and stop completely twice to make the tight feeling go away. Also had the issue with my feet going numb. FUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKK. FUCK.

4/21/2010

See Above. Ran 1.5 of a 3 mile run and packed it in.

4/23/2010

Karma. Right ankle sprain and shin splints. Skipped my run again today. Been icing and using Tylenol. Will probably run tomorrow, at least for a little while. I'm not sure what the root cause of this is but I'm guessing it was too many trail runs too quickly? I don't even know because some of this was going on before I started running at Baxter. I guess a few days off won't kill me but I feel like a total dickhead sitting at home in bed reading Ultrarunning magazine and Beyond The Wall (a compilation of stories by ultra runners).

4/30/2010

I took the week off. I hated it but I guess it's best for me. Tomorrow I'll go for a short run and see how things feel. Today is the 9 year anniversary of me not getting fucked up anymore. It means much more than my birthday. I hope I have something positive to write about tomorrow...