Oh Everest, My Everest

Yesterday was a rough one, but I did it! I ran 16 miles! 16.4 to be exact. I don't particularly feel like reliving it, but I will summarize it by saying that it was long and arduous and my knees hurt the whole damn time despite the Tylenol I took at the beginning. I developed a case of tourette's just as I hit mile 14 and I think I'm just now shaking it. (Maybe not. I still have a few choice words in me.) I also had a great desire to spear the people running in front of me. They just looked too damned chipper. Good thing I didn't actually have a spear or any functional substitutes handy.

Mister-man had some good advice for me after I vented to him yesterday. He said that I should try doing some jumprope warm-up and a stretch before I run. This is usually not necessary for long runs since we run the whole thing slowly and do the warming up by attempting to negative split and running especially slow the first 3-5 miles. But it did make me realize why my knees hurt so much: I should have done exactly that before my two short runs this last week, since I chose to do speed runs for both. That's precisely the kind of workout that requires a warm-up and stretch. My knees hurt since that first speed run and only got worse through the end of the week, culminating in a world of pain for over 3-1/2 hours yesterday morning. (Who am I kidding? I'm still in a lot of pain.)

Anyway, I was going to go back to my usual wimpy 1-mile recovery run at a whopping 14-ish minute pace, but the thought of being on my knees for that long and only accomplishing one mile wearied me. Plus, I need to add miles during the week as we stay in the double digit mileage from here on out. I decided that from now on, no matter how tired I am, I should be shooting for runs that are no shorter than 3 miles. I mean, am I just going to stop before I get to the end of that marathon because I'm tired? Hell no. So, I took off into the nice misty day for a jog around some different parts of campus.

The cool weather felt good, so I just sort of took off with nary a care. My recovery run morphed into a speed workout. There were no sprints involved, which I typically like to incorporate into speed runs, but then neither were there any during my last two. I guess it's a good sign that I didn't notice until I finished, all out of breath and feeling accomplished. If I had gone just another half mile, I would have logged 20 miles this weekend. (!!) Given how beat up I feel, I'm perfectly happy with 19.5. That's a big enough deal for this little chicken.

Labels: consecutive key workouts, knees, long run, nsaids, recovery run, short run, shot blocks, speed run, sport beans, violent urges