Another week in the books! I'm happy to say things are still going well overall. My nagging calf issue continues to diminish. There is a bit of tightness/soreness in my left leg when I run, but it's nothing significant or concerning at this point. Instead of getting worse and turning into an injury as it did when I was training on my own for the half marathon, it's moving in a positive direction now with the help of my coach and physical therapist. We have identified the issue as one of running form, and as difficult as it is to train my 41-year-old body to move in an entirely new way, it turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks. Not only have the changes helped ease my calf strain, but running is more comfortable and fun now too.
To recap my general weekly routine: I am running short distances (currently 3-4 miles each) on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday with a longer run on Saturday. My coach also assigns yoga every day, two days of strength exercises, and Sunday is for biking. My long distance this week was 9 miles, and I convinced my friend Heather to meet me at a local trail for a buddy run. I was incredibly humbled to see her roll up to the parking lot to meet me at 9 am despite, as she has told me many times, "nothing good happens before 10 am." I enjoyed chatting with her and listening to music on a gorgeous morning. While mile 9 gave me more of a challenge, I felt quite strong during most of the run. Not so strong that I am able to believe that I will be able to run nearly 3 times that far in less than 4 months, but I try not to think too hard about that yet.
On a related note, I use an app called Strava to record my runs and interact virtually with friends who also run. When I was poking around today, I noticed this:
I have run 200 miles since the new year began. A professional distance runner gobbles that up easily in about two weeks, but the milestone did give me a small jolt of pride. And not far below that, the app reports that my number of runs is 186 totaling nearly 800 miles since I joined the app in December 2019. The pandemic has been defeating in so many ways (my children are growing feral as I slowly lose my will to parent them), but those 186 mornings that I got out of bed and put on my running shoes are my own little triumph.
Mileage for week 4: 19 miles
Total mileage: 67.5 miles
Days until marathon: 112 days
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