I can do it. I will do it NINE times!

Well, I went on an experimental 3-miler (summit light) from my house. (43, 88 - lost track of those...) Knee felt a titch achy on the .5 warmup, but easy enough to run through. About a mile into the run it was feeling pretty hurty and continued the rest of the run. But it does feel ok when I run uphill, so maybe I'll just run uphill the rest of the season. Ice. (Alchemy 128.4)

This afternoon at practice (44, 88), we did some firestation hills. I don't really know how far or fast I ran since I seem to have misplaced my watch again. (But I'm putting it in as 7 because Decker's blog says that Jeff said it was about 7.5  and I didn't do as many hills.) We ran out to the firestation hill, I ran 7 of them and ran back around the Telegraph way. I've found that I am VERY out of shape after taking time off. Out of breath most of the time, not used to the heat anymore and overall crap-for-crap. (DST 185.2)

My knee still sucks, so I'm just going to run through it and deal with it - I'm going to a physical therapist tomorrow, so I hope that'll help. Also, I talked to our school's athletic trainer and he looked at it and thinks it's some sort of tendinitis in the tendon base of my hamstrings, or something like that. Tendinitis sucks. Icey icey.

Morning arctic circle w/ 2x track warmup. Took it reasonably fast - 7:31, 7:29 and 7:05. Knee hurt lots from the get-go and got steadily worse the whole run. Yuk. Angry face. (Alchemy 131.9)

This afternoon, I went to a physical therapist to see what he could do about my knee's issues. He basically said a similar thing as the trainer yesterday - my lower hamstring is inflamed and causing tendinitis there - so he 'therapy-ed' it, did some exercises, massage stuff, stretching and such. He taped my feet and my hamstring and told me to only run until it hurt, then stop, stretch, ice and be done for the day. But he says it's ok to start doing some cross training on a bike, so I'll do that to at least get some aerobic work in. At practice, I ran the warmup and halfway through it was hurting lots already, so I just finished up and didn't do the rest of practice. (45, 90) (DST 185.7)

At PT today I got to do the elliptical for .75 miles. Whoopee. Rhett says I can 'beat it up' (referring to my hamstring) at the race on Saturday, so I guess that means I have the OK to race in Vegas!

This evening, I rode my stationary bike for some fartleks. Warmed up 2 miles, then did a fartlek pyramid of 1 min. hard/easy, 1 min., 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1 (all of these minutes being hard, then easy of that amount of time). Biked a total of 8.8 (5.4 hard) miles during the workout, then I did a 2 mile cooldown. Knee was pretty good most of the time, had a couple of hurty times - by the end it was getting pretty tired out. I'm just going to not count biking or swimming miles.

Started out with a little experimental jog around the track until my knee started hurting, so I actually ran a whole whopping .25 miles today. Then biked the Foremaster run (6 miles). And man, those hills give the quads a burn! And I got going SO fast on the way down! Last mile knee was getting pretty sore, so maybe I'll avoid going up that industrial road at the end of the ride next time.

After PT I squeezed in 3 easy miles on the stat. bike before I hurried off to our team night. I don't think my butt will handle sitting on a bike much longer. Ouch! Knee still pretty sore. I'm excited, but kinda scared for the race tomorrow. Goals: 1- Not die 2- Top ten 3- Break 20:00. Cross fingers.

Well, we were supposed to have a race in Vegas, but the bus died, so that didn't work out, which was very disappointing. Then, I was going to go on a nice, long bike ride, but I decided against it since my butt is getting increasingly sore from our bikes' hard saddles.

So, instead, I went swimming. Man, do I suck at swimming! I did a total of 32 lengths/16 laps for a nice 800 yd. workout doing mostly front crawl w/a little backstroke thrown in. I probably could've done more, but on the last couple laps my knee was getting hurty (wow, it really gets old saying that), so I stopped at 16.