Inspiration, Motivation and Perspiration

Amazing how you can go from an umpteen hour week of running one week, and then drop to under 7hours the next. Blech!

As I mentioned last week, I re-injured my wonky knee a bit last weekend while organizing the Kingston 5 Peaks Trail Race. Running with a heavy backpack while setting up/tearing down the course was just a bit too much for my knee on technical trails with lots of turns. I was actually pretty ok with this for the first few days as I had just gotten in a great 50km trail run a few days prior to the re-injury. I fully expected that things would settle back down again quickly after giving it a bit more TLC and extra focus on rehab.

It hasn't bounced back quite as quickly as I had hoped, but is making slow progress. It had improved to the point where I thought about even trying a local low key race. Malcolm Anderson was organizing the Run for Tomorrow Trail Marathon on his property and with it being only 3km's from our house, we had already signed up for it a few weeks ago thinking it would be a great opportunity to get a long run in. My plan was to see how my knee was during the race and if it started to bark much, I would stop. The course was run on a 2km trail loop, so it made for a good opportunity to pull the plug if I needed to as I'd never be too far away.

My knee actually felt pretty good for the first hour or so, but I did start feeling it a bit more near 90mins, and realized that it would not be wise to try to continue on, so stopped at 2hrs after completing about 25km's. While there weren't a lot of people taking part this year, it was a great event that was as much about the enjoyment and atmosphere of the day, as the running. Malcolm put a lot of effort into his event and even had a live band. We're already looking forward to next years race.

The past few days since Malcolm's run have been progressively better and I feel like I'm already heading back to a good place. On top of the added emphasis on rehab, I have also been focusing a little more on proper form and getting back into a bit more barefoot/Five Finger running again. This has not only helped with my knee, but also my chronically sore, as of late, achilles.

With improved fitness comes the desire to test oneself in a race, and I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I was considering running the Mohican 100 mile race in mid-June, but really don't feel that it would be wise structurally at this point for me. There is no way that I want a major setback now that I feel I am getting back into decent shape. My feeling now is that as long as I can increase my training again over the next few weeks that I may look at a 50miler in June or July; then consider doing a 100 again in the fall. But really, my #1 priority is to get/stay healthy and be able to enjoy lots of long runs over the summer on the trails. Everything else is secondary.

It was with that in mind, that a couple of blogs I read recently really spoke to me and are great reads. Anton Krupicka talks about the very topic of risking injury/further injury at the expense of a race. Then, there was Scott Jurek's story about his big 24hr race recently. Both of these posts provided a lot of fuel for me to ponder during upcoming runs.

I'm really looking forward to doing just that in the coming days, weeks and months. Regardless of the ridiculous heat wave we are currently experiencing, I just want to be out on the trails running long.

Good luck to everyone at Sulphur this weekend!

Training Summary (May 17-23):
Total # of hours last week – 6:47
Total # of hours this year – 229:10
Streak – 7,454 days of running in a row
Training Log Details for the Week