Long Days, Blistered, and Rollin'!

RunKeeper Stats of Today's Run I've decided to stop including the map in my blog post. It slows my site down quite a bit.

Last night I had the urge to run. I decided to wait until morning, but set my alarm for 5AM. Well something happened between 4:49 AM and 5:01 AM, because my alarm didn't go off. I suppose I zombied it off.

I ended up waking up at 7, which seemed fair enough.

I washed my face and did about 10 minutes of stretches. I drove out to my favorite run spot and started running.

It was pretty cold at first. I was told that it was 32 degrees F and that was 1 hour after I started. Nevertheless, me and my barefoot feet warmed up around mile 2. During about that time the outer part of my hip started to hurt. I decided to run with it. The pain stayed about the same for another mile.

My running buddy(who I knew was going to be there but was sleeping in) showed up and started to run with me. He set the pace at 9 minutes/mile, which was much faster than my 11 minute/mile pace. I told him about my pains. Something cool happened as I increased my speed though, my pain decreased! He explained to me that he thinks lactic acid builds up on slower runs. He used to run long runs at a 10 minute/mile pace, but found he hurt a lot the next day, while he rarely hurt after a marathon. Convinced, he switched all his practice runs to 9 minutes/mile.

Fair enough, fair enough. I trudged along at that pace, monitoring my form and such until the 11 mile mark, where I called it quits. It's the longest run I've done in a while, so it felt good(mentally) to run that far.

As I was doing some stretching on the hood of my car I noticed some blistering on the bottom of my left foot. Darnit!

I soaked them in hot saltwater, put on some socks, and went to work. All day at work my leg bothered me. Every time I swung it forward to step it hurt. Something just wasn't right!

I came home and immediately began researching some stretches and skimming through some "how to run without injury" articles. I came across some great stuff written by Olympic runners. The thing is, I seemed to be doing everything right.

 

The idea of a foam roller had been running through my mind all day. If I just had a foam roller... A friend of mine has one, but I feel kind of bad about mooching off his, so I made my own.

If anyone would like to buy one please notify me. They seem to be in high demand...

I watched some videos and went at it. It hurt, but in a good way. By the time I was done rolling over my bottom half twice I was laughing in pleasure(kind of like when the crazy geocaching* chiropractor cracks your neck).

*My chiropractor is a geocaching nut. He recently got his 1000's geocache! That's a lot of time looking through the woods for gold coins and happy meal toys!

And now I am sitting here, writing about how I did all this in one day. And despite the aches and pains, I feel great inside and wouldn't change a thing.