I haven’t written much lately for a couple reasons: 1) Amanda and I have been busy starting up our new business, and 2) I haven’t been running.
The latter is significant because much of my blog is about my running and without that, what do I write about? OK there are plenty of other topics, but also important is that not running can be depressing. It frustrates me to no end that I haven’t been able to run – I missed all the good 50-degree weather in early November and now with snow and ice on the ground I can’t even ride my bike. I’ve used the stationary bike at home a few times but that’s even worse than a treadmill. I did get in a great long ride in mid November – 35 miles in 2.5 hours, and it was fun the whole way. Since I don’t have clips on my pedals it’s hard for me to engage my hamstrings, which is good for my injured right one.
I don’t think I ever recovered from the Harvest Hustle and Doggie Dash, running 5K PRs on back-to-back weekends. Or rather, I didn’t allow myself to recover. I was feeling so strong after those races that my next couple workouts were faster than usual and after the second one my hamstring tightened up afterwards. I took a couple days off and then ran a couple more 5-milers, the last one on Halloween, but it was still feeling tight, so I figured I’d be conservative and rest it for an entire week.
After the week off I ran a couple short runs under 3 miles with a day rest in between, and my hamstring felt no better than before! Ugh. So I took TWELVE days off with no running, although I did get some cycling in. I ran on Thanksgiving day for 3 miles with Haven and my hamstring felt great! No problems. I took the next day off just to be sure, then ran 3 miles with Beacon and as soon as I got home and stopped running, my hamstring was more sore than it’s ever been and I was even limping for the rest of the day! What the heck?
Partly I can “blame” Beacon. We ran at what felt like a 9:00 pace but when I mapped it out afterwards I was alarmed to learn that he had pulled me to a 7:30 pace! Still, it felt easy and I was paying close attention to my legs and never felt a twinge of anything until after the run. Now I’m in the middle of another forced layoff and just hoping that my hamstring will actually heal.
Hopefully it is healing. I haven’t felt any tightness in about a week and I’m actually considering running on it – very slowly and very briefly – sometime soon. Yet there’s some trepidation because the last two times that my leg felt healed it turned out not to be, so maybe I should wait another whole week just to be certain?
I know that healing takes time, but what’s so odd to me is that my initial injury never felt anywhere close to serious. Just a little stiffness in the hamstring; in fact I’ve had that before after some speed workouts. It’s never hurt to the point that I couldn’t run without pain but I wanted to catch it early before injuries started cascading. This has never felt like an injury that would’ve required more than a couple days to heal, yet here I am.
The good thing is that Amanda and I have been busy with 2 Feet 4 Paws so most days it’s easy to forget that I’m not running that day, but I can feel the effects. It’s harder to wake up when I’m “not a runner” and food doesn’t taste as good when I haven’t been exercising. Time heals all wounds and eventually it will heal this one, but boy is it tough having to wait!