December 2010 Running Recap
Whew! Another month of training is in the books! Going into the month, I thought it would be an awesome month for marathon training. I had 3+ weeks of vacation scheduled, which meant plenty of time for running. I should’ve known it wouldn’t be quite that simple…
Early in the month, our household had the pleasure of dealing with a stomach bug that Sam brought home from daycare. He got it, Julie got it, and then I got it. The bug derailed training for 3 days, though it did lighten the load a bit (not a recommended way of dropping weight, by the way). As if that wasn’t bad enough, once I started feeling better, and resumed training, I got a sharp pain on the outside of my left knee, towards the end of a 9 mile run.
For those of you keeping score at home, my left knee is my good knee. This also happened to be the first run of my 3+ week long vacation. So much for running to my heart’s content! As it turned out, the pain was caused by a tight IT band, which I immediately began to rehab, spending lots of time with the foam roller, and within a week I was able to run a 12 mile long run before experiencing anymore pain. A week after that, I made it 15.5 miles before feeling any pain, and the following week I hit 16 miles with no pain or discomfort whatsoever.
As December neared its end, the IT band seemed to be on the mend. Unfortunately, during the 2 weeks that it took to rehab, I missed an 18 mile run and a 20 mile run, and I still didn’t know if I’d be able to make it back to 16 miles (the 16 mile run came on January 2nd) without pain. This was causing me to seriously reconsider running The Cowtown Marathon at the end of February. To further press the issue, The Cowtown organizers would begin charging a $20 race change fee after December 31st. I had a decision to make!
On New Year’s Eve, after considerable deliberation, I decided that it was in my best interest to forgo the marathon for now, and changed my registration to the half marathon. While I’m disappointed at not doing the marathon, I know that there will be more opportunities, and my ultimate goal isn’t to run a marathon, it’s to run for life. To achieve this goal, I need to run smart, and remain healthy. On the bright side, I’ve already put in several long runs beyond the half marathon distance, and I’ve run already run 2 tempo runs that matched the longest tempo runs of previous half marathon training, as well as another tempo run that exceeded those. I’ve got a great base to build on over the next 7+ weeks of training!
Now that I’ve thoroughly bored you, let me bore you some more with stats from December:
- Total Miles: 175.5
- Total Time: 27:26:03
- Average Pace: 9:23/mile
Additional Notes
Even with the illness and injury, I was able to run 20 out of 31 days (keep in mind that my marathon training plan only calls for 4 days of running per week). I also ran my longest tempo run ever—7 miles (that’s not counting warm up and cool down miles), and even did 11 and 12 mile “easy” runs during the week. Thank goodness for that vacation time!
In the past, I’ve broken down the monthly mileage by the type of run, but since I don’t always separate out my warm up or cool down miles from tempo or interval miles, the numbers can be a bit skewed, and inconsistent. Instead, I am just going to list the number of times I did each type of run:
- Easy: 14 runs (did a double on 12/31)
- Tempo: 2
- Intervals: 1
- Hills: 2
- Long: 2
- Shortest Run: 4 miles
- Longest Run: 15.5 miles
December marks the 3rd time I’ve gone over 170 miles in a month (3 of the last 4 months), and the 175.5 miles is the 2nd most miles I’ve ever run in a month. December is also the 17th consecutive month of running 100 or more miles, and the 5th straight month over 150 miles.
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Bryan
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