End of Week Random Running

Last night I managed to get in a quick three mile run while my girl was at gymnastics. After the kiddos went to bed last night, I pulled out my running/exercise log to look over the past year and see how things have gone. I started this log at the end of December 2009, and have logged just about every day I did something active (usually running or tennis, but also some skiing thrown in). It looks like I'm on track to have exercised about one third of the days in the year. Between traveling, working, kiddos, and a frustrating and somewhat prolonged injury at the beginning of the year? I'm probably lucky to have made that.

My plan at the end of 2009 was to gear up and run a marathon in the spring of 2010, but hamstring tendonitis in early January completely derailed that plan. I was in the middle of ramping up, doing 5-9 miles fairly regularly, and everything came to a screeching halt. It took three months of medicine, resting, trying to run, resting some more, and a LOT of irritation before I was able to run even a mile without having to stop in pain.

It was an incredibly frustrating time, because I could feel the nice base I'd built slipping away, and there was nothing I could do. I did some spinning on the bike some evenings, and I managed to play a little tennis without gimping around too badly, but everything I did was affected. There were so many times I'd go out to try to run just a little, and I'd have to stop in pain after less than 5 minutes of slow jogging. At that point, I simply wanted to be pain free - I didn't even care about the lost base anymore.

I've still not built back up much of my base yet, but I will say that most of the time I go for my runs, I really enjoy them. It's not completely pain free even now, but it's enough that I can ignore the remaining achiness that comes and goes, and lose myself in the run.  It's much easier to remind myself how lucky I am to be able to still make my body do pretty much what I want it to do, because it hasn't always been - and won't always be - this way.