cheryl

Another day of no running due to a small little blister on my little toe.  Who would think a small little thing like that could take me out?  Usually I'm able to run around a blister, but not this one.  The way it feels I don't know if I'll be able to run at all this week.  You know how you can just tell based on pain how long something is going to last?  When it keeps you awake at night burning you know it's going to be trouble.  Hopefully by Thursday I'll be back at it.  I'll miss my group tomorrow and those lovely hills, but what can you do?   I did manage to put in 20 minutes on the Stair Master at the Rec Ctr, so at least that's something.

Day 4 of no running because of the mother of all blisters.  This is as bad as when I broke my toe a few years ago.  With that I was able to put on a shoe and run a week later.  I'm wondering if I'll be able to do that with this blister.  A weird thing about it is that at night it throbs and burns and I have trouble sleeping.  I've never had this experience with a blister before.  We'll see what happens.  I did make it to the Rec Center and spent 20 minutes on the stairmaster.  I wanted to go back in the evening and do more, but I decided I'd rather watch my son's football practice.  So a 20 minute workout yesterday and today.  Not the greatest marathon training.

Progress today.  My toe did not ache last night, so I thought today would be better, which it ultimately was.  I put some liquid bandaid on the blister and that seemed to help.  It was still painful to run with a shoe on, so I went to the park by Marv Jenson's and ran there on the grass with only socks on.  The only problem was that they don't seem to water it too well and there were several dead patches.  Have you ever run on dead grass?  It can get prickly.  Anyway, I ran around there for 30 minutes.  My toe was aching a little at the end.  I later went to the Rec Ctr and did 20 minutes on the Stair Master, then I tried running a little on their track, and interestingly, my toe did not hurt (had shoes on of course.)  So I ran a little there.  We'll see how it goes tomorrow with the group.

I thought I'd give the group a try this morning.  I got there at 5:30, but my foot was hurting, so I skipped out on early miles and just tried to warm up and get to where the blister wasn't bothering me.  After a little running on the Bingham football field, things felt pretty good.  The plan was to do a 6.5 mile tempo run.  I really wanted to practice staying relaxed on this run and having a better experience from last week.  I kept thinking "loose and relaxed, stay loose and relaxed."  I'd give myself about a B minus on accomplishing that.  I felt more relaxed than last week, but still was tightening up more than I wanted.  It's hard to change something that has become very ingrained.  Patience, I must have patience.  And lots of practice.  Anyway, overall it was a fun run, I enjoyed talking with Jody and then Michelle M. at the end when we added on extra at the track.  By that point I had stiffened up from standing around too long, so there was no "loose and relaxed" going on during that run.  By the way, the Garmin says the avg. pace for the main tempo run was 8:10. 

Thirty-six easy minutes on the canal road.  Working on "effortless" running.  Need to do that if I'm going to keep running for the long haul.

Football and kids are messing with me getting in a good Saturday run.  The kids mess me up by staying out late and making it difficult to get to bed at a decent hour, and then the football comes too early in the morning--8:00 the past two weeks.  So I plan to run after football, but you know how things go, it never works out quite as well as if you get your run in early.  Today I went out around 1:00 planning to run for about two hours, I get about 16 minutes in my run and I have to stop and go back home.  Once home, I get on the treadmill and plan to run for an hour straight, but that doesn't happen either.  I probably got in a total 90 minutes of running spaced out, not continuous.  Does that count for a long run?