Going With The Flow

Walk/jogged about 2 miles of the Mesa Falls Nature Trail. 

Day off from running. Short biking and strength training. 

Another great post by Functional Path Training -

Hard Work

It is a given that to achieve any level of success in sport demands hard work. That being said anyone can work hard, the champions are the ones who work smart. They know how to balance the work in order to get full benefit from the time and effort in training. Some athletes and coaches make the choice to try to go hard all the time with the hope that they will survive. It is just that hope & hope does not win medals. In reality more often than not it is this athlete who is seldom there when it counts the most. They either get hurt or spend all their time managing niggling injuries that keep them from achieving results. The alternative is to train smart, understand you capabilities and recoverability so that you can thrive and be at your best when the stakes are highest.  Smart training balances the hard with the easy, it takes into account individual differences and allows for differing adaptation times to different training demands. To train smart listen to your body and follow what it is telling you. Training accumulates over time so recognize that you are in it for the long term.  

20 minutes of slow running with Jake.

My running plan the next couple weeks is 2 days on, 1 day off - morning run, afternoon run, off, repeat. I'm really hoping to be able to get up to 4 miles by the end of the month. Progress is slowwww.

I felt pretty good this morning so I decided to run in the morning instead of the afternoon. 2.5 miles in 21 minutes. Only a little incision area discomfort, no compensation pain. I am 9 weeks post-op today. I am guessing that I need about three more weeks to really feel good all the time.I still have a pretty significant bump around the incision areas that haven't gone away yet. Any suggestions to promote healing?

Great article and video about Gary Player, 77-year old and was in the ESPN body issue. He is still going strong and has some great things to say - 

“America is maybe the most unhealthy nation in the world because they live on crap,” Player said. “They’ve got the best food in the world, the best farmers and the best food but they live on crap. When [British chef] Jamie Oliver went to America he went to areas where children never had cabbage or broccoli or spinach or vegetables in their life. People giving their children a soft drink and a doughnut to go to school. No wonder academically they’re affected.” 

“Most of my friends are dead and I’m going on to 78. I’m so fit and strong. I could get a heart attack, that can happen in life. But dam it all man, I get up in the morning at six o’clock. I work on my ranch. I mix cement. This morning, I stood there with a guy, we’re doing a new land. For three hours I helped pick up rocks. Now I’m in such great shape. I climb a mountain, I swim in my pool. I walk and I exercise. I don’t ask anyone on my ranch to do anything that I wouldn’t do. You got to keep your body moving, moving, moving.” 

Forced day off + work stress = not a happy camper. Psoas hurts.

2 miles around the block. Psoas muscle still super achy so I scheduled a PT visit for later this morning. 

I self-delegated myself as photographer and cheerleader for the Tour de Run. Honestly, it was hard for me to watch 3 races this weekend. One race and usually I'm okay, but after the third one I was feeling sad that I couldn't run even one of the stages' distances, much less race all of them. Maybe I'm trying too hard to get better.

Anyway, I ran 3 x 1 mile with about a half hour in between each mile.