Avoiding the injury bug

After 3 weeks of easy running in recovery or anti-taper mode it's looking up for the road ahead as my body has held up so far. However, looking around blogland at some people I follow it seems there is some kind of injury bug going around. Let's see now, Dawn has been under the weather with a cold all week, Flash has issues with his feet, Eric had a great race last week and then just fell apart, Zeke is totally pissed at not being able to run and Andrew just did a marathon on one leg. Here's a vote of encouragement to all these and other injured runners out there and the hope that you are all back in action sooner than later, hang in there!

Finished off the week on Saturday with an easy 6 mile loop around town in the fog for a feeble total of only 28 miles. My only 'issues' recently have been a sore hip and some blisters that seem to be related to my newest Mizuno's (<200 miles). The trick about these little issues is to not 'let on' that they are bothering me and never ever limp in public or 'Coach' will be on me in an instant. Unfortunately 'Coach' often reads my blog and so I may be found out ;-)

As you know I just got a new Garmin and being such a slave to my geeky device it has forced me to adjust my running week to start on Sunday. I guess this can be a good thing and a bad thing.

Good in that I now start all my weeks off with a decent mileage day instead of the usual zero when I used to start on Monday which is always a rest day.

Bad in that I'm being a slave to it.

Good in that now one look at the watch history gives my exact weekly mileage to the 0.01 miles and totals and averages for the week to date.

BAD in being a slave to the proverbial mileage game.

GOOD in that I know better and also cause Coach is watching ;-) (Enough silliness!)

Today's run was an easy (but all alone) out and back 12 miler at 7:58 pace overall. Beautiful sunny day with light winds and temps around 20C (68F). Did the run later than usual for a weekend starting just after noon because I had slept in and couldn't fit it in before church. After church I had time to put down a cushion floor in a bathroom we're renovating before taking off for the run. It only took about 1/2hr to do the job since the flooring was all precut and ready to glue down and it also gave Jo a chance to do some touch up painting while I was gone.

Back to the run, great day but no company but my thoughts and wondering how my fellow runners are doing out there. Andrew and Marc have a big day today running the Holyoke marathon and I'm anxious to hear about how they did. Late breaking new just now from Andrew said he was disappointed but I think he should be proud. Duncan had a 2 min + PR in the Broad Street 10 mile race today but if you know Dunc he's downplaying his fine/amazing/fast/I'm impressed performance. I think he should also be proud of his effort as should Dallen in Chicago who just ran a fast 1:16 1/2 marathon at Indy.

Whew, hard to fit a run in here! So 6 miles out in 48:26 and then turn around and back in 47:30 while trying to hold back the effort. Feeling pretty good today except for the feet which started to get sore from the turnaround. Another weird thing is remeasuring my old routes and finding they are all a bit longer (good thing) than what I'd been recording. Now it looks like I'll be going faster over less distance but I'll really be running slower over a longer distance (if that makes any sense at all tell me what it means).

So, another recovery week and the Fredericton 10k on the weekend. Let's hope that the injury bug will avoid me and it will be a good effort for a marathoner with no speed in his legs recently. And here's to those injured runners out there, hope you all get well soon and are running fast and free very soon. Have a good week!