Back to the Grind

After a relaxing weekend, I am refreshed (relatively) and ready for another workweek. With Annie’s dad visiting, we were both exhausted (her more so than me, of course) from last week. Luckily, we got to sleep in a little each day and yesterday we spent the day visiting my parents and taking it easy out in West Virginia. As school approaches for her, and my LSAT studying begins in the next few weeks, we’ll have less and less time to relax on the weekends.

Anyway, Saturday morning we got up and went to the gym around 10 AM. Annie wanted to go to the 10AM spinning class and I wanted to get my long run in for the week. I set out on the Magic Treadmill of Fun for my 6-mile destination at a nice 10:30 min/mile pace. Most of the run was fine without any real problems. As I increase my mileage my endurance will expand as well. At this point, I didn’t get really physically tired until around 5 miles, and even then, I was able to rally and felt like if I had to, I could have kept running for another mile or so.

About mile 4 I started to feel my left shin splint starting to act up. I realized that I was pronating in such a way that I was putting too much pressure on the outside fo my foot (a leftover of a foot surgery I had several years back) and stressing those outside muscles. So, I spent the next mile or so trying to correct that and by the time I hit 5 miles, the pain was gone and didn’t return.

All in all, I was very pleased with the run. Anytime I get tired and feel the temptation to quit and then push through it to the end, I’m happy. Of course, I took two hydration breaks (at 2 miles and again at 4 miles), which was nice because I use that time to briskly walk while I take a few drinks. I’ve gotten those breaks down to less than a minute, so they don’t really impact my overall performance too much. And anything over 4 miles requires at least one hydration break since they say you should drink for every 20 minutes you’re running or something like that.

So, going into this week I’m feeling pretty good. I’m increasing my mileage by 10% so my normal runs will be 3.85 miles while my long runs will be 6.6 miles (approximately). I’ll stay at those levels for another two weeks before increasing again. Slow and steady is my motto. I’m already running more than 5K each day, so I’m no longer worried about running that distance at a decent pace like I was back in July before the Run to Cooperstown. Every mileage increase is a step in the right direction towards my first half marathon sometime early next year.