A Letter to My Leg

Dear IT Band and Wonky Knee,

I have iced.
I have stretched.
I have foam rolled like a mutha fu&*#.
I have pumped you full of Ibuprofen.
I have yoga'd.
I have rested.

Today I shall run and I will need you to help me. You see my dear little leg, we have a schedule to keep and a really fun few months of running ahead of us and we need to work as a team.

For most of my life, I have always hated you. You are too big, too short and not shapely enough.

But now that I have discovered running...I appreciate you (and your twin sister, my right leg) and all the miles you carry my body through...but I need you to cooperate and work with me here. I promise to be good to you...to be more consistent in my training....to up my mileage slowly and to thank you every single day.

And I'll try to shave you more often, cause ya know...it's going to be getting warm soon. And I'm working on making you skinnier after seeing last weekends photos, sorry bout that.

Much love,
Lindsay

#6

Saturday was my my 6th half-marathon. I wasn't sure I wanted to do it with my knee/IT band giving me troubles and after losing my precious Garmin on Friday morning (haven't told that story, I'm still upset about it) which kind of put me in a funk and probably because I depend on it too much.

Which is stupid. I know.

If was my club's race, so I was going anyway to help out....why not run, right? I was NOT excited about the fact that the in-and-back course was uphill for the first half. Yup.

Kara and I started out together...and plugged along for the first half...at one point she screamed at me "what the f&*# is with these hills dude!" I laughed at her crazy ass and kept plugging away. I was actually doing just fine with the slow incline and felt pretty good. Our pace (according to her yelling out times) was hovering around 8:30-8:45/pace which is pretty much where I hoped to be. We hit the turn around point and kept cruising, her foot was bothering her so she dropped back a bit and I kept on trucking. I got kind of lonely towards the end as it was a small race and and that point we had all spaced out on the course. I had NO idea what kind of pace was running which was irritating and liberating at the same time and around mile 9.5 my knee/IT band starting to irritate me, a lot. There was one big hill at the end (so effin rude) and I cruised to the finish where we all bitched about how the course felt uphill the WHOLE time.

Thank you photog, for capturing my thunder thighs in photo #1 and the look of pain in photo #2. Awesome.

Annnnnnnd, Wade and Brian ran with their shirts off, total boyfriends. I swear, those boys compete at everything! 

Our timing system had a little mess-up so I'm still waiting on results but I think I was right around 1:54:XX...I'm happy with that I suppose, I'm happy I ran. My body is pissed off a little bit, but I'll be OK.

I literally limped back and forth between registration/food and the finish line.

I hung around for a while packing stuff up, bringing the full marathoners in and passing out water before we took off to grab lunch and beers.

And I made Grimaldi's pizza my bitch that night. It was amazing.

4 Legged Running

Tomorrow is the Desert Classic Marathon/Half Marathon hosted by my club, the Arizona Road Racers.

I'm excited for the actual event, the process, the race enviroment...all of that.

But I'm NOT excited about the end result of running 13.1 miles. I really hope my IT band holds up. I have been babying it since RnRAZ so I'm hoping the rest + cross-training + easy runs makes the difference.

If it feels stiff tomorrow am, I will drop down to the 5k. I won't feel bad about it and I won't beat myself up over it.

I went for an easy 3 mile run yesterday. As I laced my shoes up I decided to make it a fun run. No watch, easy pace, beautiful weather, calm tunes, and my favorite 4-legged running buddy...

If anyone ever gets bored with running, bring your dog. Watching the excitement in her face brought a whole new meaning to WHY I ran yesterday.  That was also Sadie's furthest run to date!

I have to remember what's on the horizon and prevent injury and burnout...Ragnar Del Sol and 26.2 baby.

Shoe Love (obsession)

Oh yes....these are finally in my closet. *love*