Thursday, May 31, 2007

Just footlin' for a few days..

Since my nuttiness 2 weeks ago I've been taking it easy on myself, just doing the occasional 2-4 miler when I fancied them and taking the pressure off my one painful reminder - the sore toe. To my pleasure it has now started to turn mildly black and is a lot less painful so it looks like I got away lightly. Terry told me to watch it wasn't a stress fracture so of course I googled toe stress fractures immediately and found they were regular by-products of, for example, "a sudden increase in exercise intensity". I think I got away lightly this time..

Next Monday, training begins. And as I intimated last week I think I'm going to be doing Hal Higdon's intermediate II program, taking on board a lot of information from the Advanced Marathoning book but not doing the speedwork on running days. Instead, I'm going to try to work some of those speed workouts on my eliptical on my crosstraining days. I hope that this way I can get the speed benefits without the risk of injuring myself. I am my own experiment.

Had an amazing run this evening - just 2 miles out on our farm. We have a big lake we use for irrigation but it's been raining so much it's nearly overflowing every day. There is a sluice gate to take out the overflow but it gets blocked with reeds most days so one of us goes out there once a day to unblock it. Tonight it was my turn and after a day of crazy weather (hot / cold / sunny / wet) it was a dry sunny turn and it was just beautiful. I bounded through the grass like a happy gazelle / madwoman and very nearly went for a swim in the lake, but this is England and May and it has not been warm - I decided enough madness for a little while. Pneumonia would be a major setback.

Finally - like most people I HATE the sound of my voice when I hear it recorded but it obviously does not put me off enough because I'm out there at the moment - you can hear me sounding like Mary Poppins (along with Terry and Gordon from Scotland) in Steve Runner's promo for the Phedippidations World Wide Half and I also think Dr Monte has finished his weight loss CD and has done a preview on his most recent podcast. So I'm now holding out for Oprah...

Otherwise I'm just resting up and limbering - getting ready for next week when the race is on. I'm with Maddy and Cory on the great idea of toting up our training miles - I'll see if I can work out how to restart my mileage counter on BuckEyeOutdoors so I can see how much I train for this and we'll add everyone's miles up at the end.. the marathons will seem like peanuts!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Pneumonia would be a major setback.

As one who has had to reschedule a marathon due to pneumonia, I do not recommend getting it as part of your training regiment.

Is that you on the promo? Cool!