from running hard to hardly running

okay.... two months since my last post.... i haven't posted anything because i haven't been running. after a great 4-miler in december (finished 4th in my age group of 276 running a 7:07 pace at 68.7%) and a few weeks of winter speed training with my track club, i decided to heed the perpetual nagging soreness of my achilles tendons and take a break. i skipped the new year's eve run in prospect park, and my track club's new year's day run, skipped the remaining speed workouts, and stopped running all together for the month of january....

while on this hiatus i went crazy with crosstraining at the gym and at home -- bike, elliptical, weights, yoga, even jillian michaels' videos on cable (her 'no more trouble zones' is no joke!). one night, three weeks into this new agenda, i did an hour on one of the gym's stepper machines (whatever it's called...not an elliptical or stair-climber, but something else). when i tried to jog home, as i often do, i was stopped by a sharp pain in my right ankle. not the achilles but in the medial anterior region. no big deal, i thought -- until the next week, when i went out for my first 3-mile post-hiatus training run and the pain returned during the last 1/2 mile. not sharp enough to alter my stride, but only because i really concentrated on keeping my form. i waited a few days, feeling mild but noticeable pain while walking up and down stairs, then went out for another easy run. i managed 30 minutes, again without altering my form -- but the discomfort was undeniable and i had trouble walking for the remainder of the day. ice and ibuprofen returned my to status quo.

so, it's been a week since my last run. i skipped today's 4-miler. i'm hoping to be okay in two weeks for the pptc cherry tree 10 mile run and relay, and then for the al gordon snowflake 5k which will mark the 1-year anniversary of my first ever competitive race.

(interesting to read my last post about my right ankle giving me signals during a 10k in december... i'd forgotten about that. it's my right ankle that's the problem right now, so perhaps i shouldn't blame the gym's stepper machine.)

i don't like not being able to run, of course. but this period is giving me much-needed space to think about my approach to running and my goals as a runner. it's been exciting to get faster and faster and i still want to see how fast i can run. but perhaps i've given too much emphasis to performance and competition, and maybe now is the time to relax about all of that and return to running for the love of it. i'll be running the ny marathon in november, my first marathon, so i'll need to focus on endurance and long runs rather than speed at some point. but first and foremost i need to be able to run without pain!

it's just been really exciting for me this past year to discover my abilities and to push myself in new directions, and i'm sure the coming year will be full of new and interesting discoveries about me as a runner and life in general.