My wife Karen claims that after I had awakened after my shoulder surgery last Tuesday that I asked Dr. Kimball how long before I could run again and he said three weeks. I honestly have no memory of that conversation. (She also claims I said "pineapple" multiple times, but that's another story.) Today I decided that six days was long enough.
I should point out that I am not acting totally irresponsibly. Before the surgery, I asked about recovery. Dr. Kimball said that, similar to my son's surgery earlier this year, the surgery was relatively minor, just cleaning up some rough edges, so there was no harm I could do by overdoing it during recovery. Pain would be the only limiting factor. Three days after surgery I got tired of being constipated by the pain medication so I went off it to see just how much pain was there. There wasn't all that much, and I had good mobility in the shoulder, so I've been off it for three days now. I ran with Tom, Nathan, Darin, Bill, and Steve (King) at noon today. While my shoulder felt fine before, during, and after the run, shortly into the run I realized that my lungs didn't feel quit as fine. I had a hard time breathing the entire run, especially up the big hill. It wasn't long before Tom, Nathan, Darin, and Steve began to pull ever farther away. I felt good just to be able to hang with Bill until the end, although he did slow down a couple of times to allow me to hang with him. We ran the 5 miles in around 38:39 (after subtracting streetlight stops). That's roughly 7:44/mi, which really isn't that bad for me for this run. I feel pretty good about this first post-surgery run, but I can tell I'm going to need to recover quickly and step it up if I want to run with the leaders on Mondays. Tom is running especially strong.
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