Running Chick

Greetings from Southern Illinois, where it’s raining like a mofo.  I guess it’s better than the 80 mph wind that we had for the first ten hours of the drive. 

I held my camera in my lap for the majority of the trip waiting to snap a picture of something exciting but I got nothing. A few windmills and some other boring things, but that’s about it. As soon as I packed my camera away as dusk was falling, we came around a corner just North of Effingham, IL and discovered a giant semi flipped over in the grassy median of the expressway. Figures!

We pulled into Marion, IL after twelve hours on the road, checked into our hotel and decided to try and find a little bar to have a drink or two. Guess what? Marion, IL stops serving after 9pm on Sundays. Seriously. Bah.

We have another nine hours on the schedule tomorrow before we arrive at our final destination in Vidalia, GA. We go through Nashville and Atlanta, so I’m hoping this leg of the trip will provide me with more picture taking opportunities.

No running this week, but I did do trainer rides of 30 minutes, 40 minutes and 1 hour and 45 minutes.  This time, my long ride was made possible by the royal wedding on DVR (loved the dress), last week’s episode of “Justified” and the first hour or so of the “Hurt Locker”. I was trying to make it to an even two hours, but I just couldn’t.

I had another session with the massage therapist on Wednesday.  He found a bunch of trigger points and knots deep in my calf and down by my ankle that he attempted to work out, while I tried not to cry. Some of them were pretty painful. He also gave me LED light therapy, which is supposed to help speed up the recovery process. Josh thinks it’s a hoax, but I don’t know. I figure if it works, great, and if not, then it’s not like I’m out anything. My leg was pretty sore the next day from all the attention it got, but it did seem to be a lot looser. Two days after the session, I was walking up & down stairs without pain and I’m thinking I’ll probably go for a short run or two this week and see how things turn out.

Sitting in a car doing nothing for 12 hours straight is hard, time to hit the sack!

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had enough of this schizophrenic weather we’ve been having. Tuesday, I was out running in a t-shirt and shorts. Yesterday it started to rain, then snow, and today it looks like this:

Since my cupboards are bare, I get to clean this mess off my car and go to the grocery store so we don’t die of starvation.

Scout had been enjoying daily romps on the deck. Now all she can do is stand in the doorway and sniff.

She is not pleased.

Anyway, after ten days off from running and a lot of cross training on the bike trainer, I hit the road again on Tuesday with high hopes. Unfortunately, as is typical with me, I overdid it with the weights the night before and my hamstrings and calves were in high revolt.  I got a very, very slow two miles done and walked the last mile back to my house. That was the day it was almost 70 degrees out, so I had a very pleasant walk home and became one with my ice packs.

I felt much better on Thursday and had an pain-free 3 mile run after work.

I was supposed to run 10 miles on Saturday, but I’m trying to cut back on my mileage while I’m working my way through the shin pain, so I decided five miles would be sufficient. Then I looked outside and saw what is typically knows as a “wintery mix” – an evil combination of freezing rain, ice pellets and snow. A sane person probably would have stayed inside, but I figured I should probably just get out there because you never know what sort of conditions you’re going to have on race day, especially in this neck of the woods, so off I went. I ended up being completely soaked from head to toe, but I did have pretty good run, and had the opportunity of break in these babies:

They’re called Brooks Ravenna and Brooks claims they’re mid way between a neutral shoe (for people who don’t have any pronation issues) and a stability shoe (for people who over-pronate – ankles roll inward).  I’ve been custom fitted by five different running stores and each time, I’ve been deemed either neutral or an over-pronator and I’ve never had the same analysis two times in a row.  So, I can only assume that I’m probably square in the middle of those two classes.  Neutral shoes don’t provide me with enough support and stability shoes give me too much support, so after much reading, I decided on the Ravennas. Plus, they were only like $4, can’t beat that! Before you start emailing me for the coupon code, I got a gift card from Josh for Christmas and then found a 10% off coupon online.  Since they were last year’s model, they were on also super sale. I do loves a bargain.

Well, alrighty, that’s the report for this week. Looking at the week ahead, the plan is to keep on icing, stretching, drugging and massaging and build my mileage back up to normal. Go me.

Spring has finally arrived here in Yooperland. It’s been teasing us for the last month or so with sun and warmish temps, but then Winter decided to give it one last go and we got dumped with heavy, wet snow last Monday. I had about 6” on my deck and a driveway berm that was just about up to the bumper on my truck (thanks, plow guy). We were back to our regularly scheduled Spring temps by mid-week and by Friday, all the snow was gone.

My trainer rides have been going pretty well, but I was not looking forward to doing 90+ minutes on Saturday to replace my 9-mile long run and was very happy to see high 50s in the forecast for Saturday. Road ride, wahoo! I decided to do my usual M-203 to Calumet/Josh’s house route because there’s not a lot of traffic on that road and it’s pretty scenic.

I think I mentioned in previous posts that I was pretty certain that my trainer rides were the reason for dropping one minute/mile on my runs so I was very interested to see if it also rubbed off on my road riding, too. My first clue was when I averaged 17.7 mph to McLain Park when I usually hover right around 13-15 mph. After the park, there’s a little climb.

Well, maybe not so little:

That dang hill goes on for around five miles of forever. There’s a slight dip around mile 15 which always fools me into thinking that the punishment is over and then – ha,ha just kidding! - back to more climbing. My speed and my legs usually take a pretty good beating on this hill, but I was able to keep things moving enough so my average speed only dropped to 14 mph when I finally reached the top. I rolled into Josh’s driveway in 1:25 and in previous rides, it’s been closer to 1:50. I think I can now officially give all the credit to my increased speed to riding my trainer 2 times/week since February. Extra bonus, my legs aren’t sore and neither are other unmentionable parts. Yays all around.  Josh and I puttered around his neighborhood so he could test out some new tires on his bike so my entire ride ended up being around 27 miles. I was going to go for 30, but the bagel I had for breakfast had long worn off and I was seriously hungry, so we ditched the rest of the ride and went to the Michigan House for lunch.

Two more days and then on Tuesday, I get to see how my legs feel about running.