Run

First day of PT was today. Not bad, and since they gave me some exercises to do, I’ve got something to fill the running slot.

::crosses fingers::

Doc says the pain in my knee is most likely torn cartilage. I’ll be getting an MRI to be certain but even best case scenario is I’m out for 6 weeks.

But on the bright side I most likely will be able to both run and ski again once this has been worked on. Just gotta be patient.

I walked to and from work yesterday after hitting the bike.

While I was at my desk my knee felt great, but after walking home I could tell it’d stiffened up and I could feel it again.

Make’s me think it might not be so hot an idea to run it on Sunday, but oh well, we’ll see how that goes.

Not bad mind you and I can definitely walk about at work without it hurting, but I can tell this thing isn’t completely healed yet.

I didn’t run on Sunday in part because of the knee but by the time I was able to get out for a run it was already 8:45, which means that I wouldn’t get to sleep until sometime around midnight . . . if I was lucky.

So in order not to fall back into the habit of ditching tomorrow morning’s run I’ve decided to do something a little lower impact and ride my bike up to Edgewater instead. I rode it to work on Saturday and it didn’t bother my knee at all so I’m hoping that trend will continue. In the mean time it’s some 13.2 miles up to the north end of the Trail and back, which is about the same distance that I’d be biking if doing a sprint triathlon, and the amount of energy used is supposedly similar so I shouldn’t feel bad about not running and at the same time go a little easier on the knee.

Not while running, but afterward when I was heading down the stairs of my building to walk to work. I was twisted a little to the left to get down the stairs as my legs were somewhat sore and something on the outside of my right knee popped. Dunno what it was. It didn’t hurt with blinding pain but it wasn’t supposed to happen. Thinking it might have just been like popping a joint, I figured I’d walk to work at a reduced pace and if the dull pain didn’t subside in a few blocks, I’d hail a cab.

Two blocks later, my knee didn’t really hurt and my sore muscles prevented me from really picking up the pace. But after sitting for a couple hours at my desk I got up to get some water and man, either bending the knee or twisting my toes inward caused a painful stiffness.

In the end I took the bus home and have spent the entire night on either the couch or in bed hoping to let this heal up. Something tells me I won’t be running on Saturday as planned . . . drat.

Strangely, after writing that last update, I only ran once, and then didn’t run as result of a string of inexcusable reasons for the next two weeks until this morning. I think I’m going to have to get used to the idea of running as a means of getting rid of stress, and that might help keep me going. I’ve got an “unofficial” goal of walking to work every day this week. Since the beginning of the month, every day I skipped a run, I’ve walked to work. The walk in of itself really isn’t so bad as its only 2 miles, however if I was to make it there on time I find myself rushing which still makes me a little gamey by the time I get to my desk despite the cooling weather.

After plugging the numbers in online, it looks like I’m supposedly burning some 340 calories a day just by walking to and from work, which incidentally is also saving me some $4 a day in bus fare. So that’s really what I call a win-win situation. Granted, I may have to get out the door a little sooner in order to walk at a slower pace, but I’m sure I’d enjoy the walk a little more that way anyway.

It looks like I’m also supposedly burning some 440ish calories with each time I run 5k. It’s funny, but I’m back to where I was 3 years ago when I stopped running, and now I’m really looking forward to the longer distances. It’s an amazing feeling of accomplishment to be back running more than 3 miles since a little over two months ago I was barely gasping my way to a full mile.

Right now I’m not really getting out the door ‘til at least 6:10, and I need to be back by 7:00 to get to work on time. If I could just get myself going faster, I could have from 6:00 ‘til 7:00 to run. And I know all this is just selfish gabbing, but I’m looking forward to keeping progress of this on the mapmyrun calendar again. I’d been logging the walks to and from work and after a while I noticed the first half of the month was gone and it was half full of times I slept in.

But yeah, I just have to keep focused and keep going. Not having a running partner is something of a challenge because there’s no one to keep me motivated but myself. Thus the long-winded entries. I’m getting impatient and thinking I might be able to just jump to 4 or 4.5 mile runs. Although after taking two weeks off, I think I’ll stick to the current length for the rest of the week, and then consider going to 4. Or at least going to the end of the sixth pier, since I tend to gauge how far I’ve gone based on how many of those I’ve passed. Alright, I’ve procrastinated long enough. Time to study for this state exam.

I’ve been a little under the weather all week and skipped both Tuesday and Thursday. To make up for it, I ran two miles on Saturday with the thought I’d be back up to the normal dose today, but unfortunately the hangover from last night really prevented that from happening. At least I got something in yesterday, but come Tuesday, I’m definately hitting the trail regardless.

I actually hit 3.07 miles last Sunday and it was foggy as all hell along the lakefront. Strangely enough in the area just south of the woods north of Oak Street Beach where there’s nothing but concrete, I couldn’t even see the water. It was like I was on some other planet and was crazy humid. But the theory was if it was humid it would make it harder on me and thus make Tuesday/Thursday seem easier by comparison.

I must be getting cocky, as I agreed to do another 5k, this one at the end of October. Hopefully that’ll motivate me to keep getting up earlier twice during the week.

On sunday I’d been asked to go watch her run the Chicago Half-Marathon. It rained the entire time and only got worse as the race went on. By the time she crossed the finish line the rain drops were the size of dimes and falling horizontally. Fortunately there wasn’t any lightning and the race didn’t get canceled.

With the weather taking a cold snap I have to say its really nice running in the mornings now and I really tell the difference. It’s like I’m running with air-conditioning on. I’ve been watching how I’ve been lifting my legs so my knees aren’t as sore. So I with all that in mind, I actually ran 2.62 miles on Thursday. So as a result I think I’m down for for the 5k then in November, and all that typing was for naught.

so after taking the advice of a friend, I looked online for a way to track the distance a little better than just using Streets & Trips, and came up with mapmyrun. Been using it for the past week now, and it seems to be working pretty well. Plus as an added bonus, my job requires looking over Google Maps quite a bit, which the site uses for a base, so I can actually track my morning’s progress when I get into work without having to worry about getting hassled.

Which brings me of course to today. On Sunday I was supposed to make the leap from 1.63 miles to 1.80 (yes, I’m still working my way back up to a mere 3 miles). Excuses may be like posteriors in which we all have ‘em and they all stink, however I ran during mid-day, and by the time I reached the North Ave Beach, the sand had been baking long enough it felt like I was running through an oven. Needless to say, I felt like I could have run more but whether I liked it or not, the heat had become a definite factor at stopped at 1.75. So when I hit 1.8 this morning, I figured what the hell, it was pretty nice out, maybe I could stretch it to make up for weenie’ing out on Sunday. I’ve heard you’re not supposed to add more than 10% in distance each week when you’re starting back up again and I can definitely say, it took longer to recover afterward while I was walking back to the tunnel. The distance ran was 2.16, and which (doing mental math because I’m too lazy to open up calculator) comes out to be an additional 30% over last week’s 1.63 and thus 3x the additional distance. So I guess I broke the 2 mile mark a week earlier than I expected.

As I type this, hindsight (as well as possibly some of you later on) tells me that was not so swift a move, and that deviating from my regular plan could potentially result in injury, causing me to start back to the beginning of the summer when my re-entry into running was delayed by a broken toe.

I think, however, I’ve not yet really addressed the main issue on this one, and that’s that I’m worried about November. The woman (feels weird saying that, I still like to think of myself as a kid) I’ve been seeing lately has been trying to talk me into a running a 5k with a friend of hers in November. I’ve been reluctant, but at the same time, 3 miles was what I used to run 3 times a week back in school, so there’s definitely that part of me that sees it as being feasible. Oh and I should mention she’s ran at least one marathon. Soooooo . . . with all that on paper, I think it safely tips the scales against.

There is a good portion of the inner psyche that will call myself a wuss, but it seems to me that it’d be nice to be able to know I could safely run more than a 5k, before entering a 5k. I guess if I upped the distance a quarter mile each week, I could potentially pull it off, but truth be told, I know full well she and her friend are going to be done with this before they realize they even started and I’ll probably be on death’s door and about 5 full minutes behind them or worse yet, anchoring them to a near walking-pace.

So I guess I’m still debating it. Either cave and do it or weenie out and look like a pansy. Why do I enter myself into these no-win situations? Eh, it’s my own fault, I should have just said “Not Yet.” But in either case, the one thing I’m not doing is pushing myself beyond what I’ve scheduled again. The worst case scenario is making up my mind that I want to do it, and then blowing something out. It’s going to be hard, but I think I’m just going to run the 1.8 on Thursday and try to focus on form and time, while keeping careful note of how long it took for the log.

That way at the very least I’ll be on track for . . . well . . . whatever the hell it is I’m running for right now.

So I’ve ran (more or less) three times a week for the past three weeks. I’m up to a mile and a half now which is where I really view my starting point because before I had to walk half a mile to the Lake, run a mile, and then walk a mile and a half back. Otherwise I’d just run there, run a half mile and then turn around, which didn’t strike me as very rewarding.

So now I can start up as soon as I leave the apartment, and don’t feel foolish being passed by morning joggers on my way to the lake shore trail. Incidentally I recent met and started seeing a pretty cool person who runs religiously and even ran in that nightmare last October. I haven’t ran with anyone but myself since school and while I’m not in the market for a running buddy, it does provide some motivation to get up every tuesday and thursday because if I don’t, I feel pretty childish. Whatever works I guess.