48 hours after finishing a 1/2 marathon, I felt really anxious to get back on the pavement. As strong as I felt, I knew my knee just wasn't ready for a run. I could have gone for a nice walk, but I had spaghetti and meatballs waiting for me, so how could I put that off?! Hey, I have a well-disciplined eating schedule too, darn it! But seriously, I was feeling that charley horse spasm in the back of my knee - a very familiar feeling that would have been aggravated if I didn't listen to that nagging discomfort. It wasn't painful, just uncomfortable. I didn't need to make it worse. Rest is good, and as the common running advice goes, "make your rest/recovery days equally as important as the runs themselves!" You see, I'm not running just to be running, because I do enjoy it - but I'm still in training for my next half-marathon. It just serves as a good reminder that 1) Listen to what your body is telling you - it knows best; and 2) Refer back to No. 1 ...no, just kidding, but I always wanted to say something like that. No. 2 is, give your body the time it needs to recuperate. Over-use injuries are very, very common - more common than people would imagine. But it's real and no one else will tell us except for our bodies. We need to be good listeners.
So now, or at least earlier this evening, three days post Long Beach, I decided to edit my training schedule just a bit and jump into my mid-week long run. Not too long, but I don't know what else to call it. My knee was feeling much, much better. That extra day of rest was well worth it! So I set out for my 8 mile run as soon as I arrived home from work... ...well, it was 100 degrees outside so I held off for another hour and then did my run. It was still warm, but not nearly as bad as it was just an hour earlier. It got dark incredibly fast, but I had my reflective gear and a very small LED flashlight (I know, I didn't mention that in my earlier post, but remind me if you're interested in hearing about it... it's really not that exciting and it's an expensive piece of gear) - and so off I went. I imagined I was on the very same run as the Long Beach 1/2... I felt great and was able to power through all three of the dreaded "hills from Hell" - mentally, it seemed to work well for me to put myself into the Long Beach course for this run. Even though I knew I wasn't running 13.1 miles tonight, I felt that I could have run a Half by the seventh mile! A positive, mental attitude sure does wonders! It helped that I was feeling up to spec, too. A simple charley horse discomfort would've ended that in short order.
Up next: 5 miles on Friday... but I have a slight dilemma to deal with. Maybe there's another "edit" in my near future.
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