Sunday, October 30, 2011

Sad News

This morning I decided to retire....

No, not from running, but I decided to retire two pairs of my beloved Nike running shorts including my oldest (and favorite) pair of lime green shorts. I think I may have had the shorts since college or shortly thereafter and they have served me well. They were becoming a little too frayed and the elastic was losing its elasticity. The other shorts were some navy blue shorts that I wore for my PR marathon, but they are a little beyond their useful life and I didnt want to risk getting arrested for indecent exposure if I kept running in them. (My wife wouldn't let me post pictures of me in the shorts for the blog post)

I've been making some progress on recovering from my calf/achilles injury and I'm able to run fairly regularly and work on building my mileage back up. I've been doing a lot of work on improving my hamstring flexibility which seems to be taking some of the stress off of the calf and achilles. A few weeks ago it was feeling really good and I was running with no discomfort or pain and I think I got a little too excited and tried to ramp up a little too quickly. I hit 50 miles in a week and had one day of some relatively easy 800m repeats. By the end of the week I could tell I should have cut the last run or two a little short or taken a day off, but I was kind of stubborn and really wanted to hit 50 miles for the week. I've been traveling for 2 out of the 3 weeks since then so I've taken it a little easier and only been doing about 30 miles a week. I can run pretty much pain and discomfort free, but when I wake up in the mornings my achilles and calf often are pretty tight.

I'm running a 10k on Nov 12 that a co-worker is the race director for and I'm hoping to run it as a tempo run. The next day my wife will be running her 1st 1/2 marathon in the San Antonio Rock and Roll 1/2 marathon. I'm going to switch from the marathon to 1/2 marathon in January because I'm not going to be ready for a marathon by then. I received an invite to the Woodlands 1/2 marathon in March so my goal is to get healthy and go for a sub 1:15 in that race.