Coming back from injury

For any of you that know me you should know by now that I’m a pretty conservative runner and am especially so with injuries. Since I’ve had this foot sprain since Tuesday I’ve eased back into getting on the road. Tuesday was a visit to the doctor to make sure nothing serious was wrong, it wasn’t. Wednesday was a massage to release the tension and work out the plantar and any other tightness in the calf. Then ice and stretching till Saturday morning.

Saturday morning was a 2 mile run walk and Sunday was the 3 mile loop around Town Lake. I don’t think I’ve run that loop in a while so it was nice change. I still have some soreness on the underside of my foot and the outside of my foot but nothing too painful. Just need to keep on icing and try and get 3 to 5 miles in on a few runs this week and then ease back into my mileage so I can join back with the group when we start the higher intensity phase in September.

My previous injuries have been a blessing in disguise so I hope this one is the same. I was training for the 2006 3M half marathon and the 2006 Boston marathon. I changed my shoes (yes stupid I know), asked the shoe floor attendant for something similar to the Mizuno Precisions but I guess they weren’t really that similar,  the month before 3M right when we were peaking and the new brand just didn’t work and I hurt myself. I did end up getting better for 3M but only ran half of it and found somebody to pace for the last part of it and just did that. It took another 2 to 3 weeks to become 100% and then it was time to ramp up the mileage for Boston. Boston 2006 ended up being a PR for me with a time of 3:01:09 The injury, in hindsight, prevented me from peaking too early for Boston which I attribute to the good race. Not sure what this injury means for CIM but I’ll just keep putting one foot in-front of the other till December and see how things go.

Is it too early to visualize the race?

So this is where you’ll all think I’m weirder than you already do. If you look at the CIM elevation profile you’ll notice there’s a decent amount of up and down even though the course is 340 ft downhill overall.

Around mile 11 at CIM is probably the “longest steep” decline in the race, followed by an equally steep uphill. If you’re wondering what that decline would feel like for those in Team Rogue running 16 on Thursday in the morning it’s a little steeper than the hill we’ll run down on 35th after passing Exposition. That steep uphill might on the CIM course might actually be almost exactly like running from the corner of 35th and Pecos to 35th and Exposition which we’ve all done many times (I’ll sure I made error in all this). Now that’s all according to a rough look at the CIM elevation profile and also the gmap-pedometer Ruth sent us for our run on 7/24: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2106302

The CIM course has some even steeper but shorter spots on the course. Since there are so many rolling hills we run in Austin it’s a nice opportunity for us to get a feel for what the different parts of the course at CIM will feel like. For me a very steep down hill doesn’t necessarily mean I can use that for all the speed because of the pounding on the quads, and then since there are some steep uphills I do need to get used to pushing a little harder on them than I like to now before it’s too late.

In the past I’ve enjoyed making elevation adjusted estimates on paces for Boston and the ever changing Austin marathons. I think I might need to try and do that CIM in a few weeks to see how I would break this race into parts and start gearing up and preparing for that over the last 10 weeks leading up to the race.