The Good -> Had a great long weekend with my family in Parry Sound! Did tons of fun stuff with the kids and celebrated my wife’s birthday, 29 again!! WooHoo!! 🙂 After not having seen my kids for almost 10 days and being able to sleep in sometimes, it was great to be smacked back to reality and get a wake up call at 4:00am on Monday from my son! I wish I could say he went back to sleep but no. Thankfully I was able to nap on Monday, not too often your nap begins at 7:30am! Anyway, I also squeezed in two runs of various lengths and weather conditions, which brings me to the bad.
The Bad -> The weather on the weekend was subpar at best. When I arrived on Friday it was nice and sunny and a decent temp. In hindsight I should have gone that afternoon for a run but as I mentioned before I hadn’t seen my kids or wife for 10 days so the chances of that happening were slim at best. So I went on Saturday, and it rained hard! Now I could have put it off and not went but about ½ hour before I got ready I was giving my wife a hard time about how she is a fair weather runner and doesn’t like going out if it is raining. Basically by shooting my mouth off I resigned myself to heading out in the downpour and I got soaked! I managed to pull off a 6km run, entirely up hill (or at least it felt like it) and spent the rest of the day getting over the chills!
The Ugly -> So Sunday was upon me and I had it set in my mind I was going for a long run. The weather once again wasn’t great, it was super windy, but I was determined I was going to put on some serious KM. Plus my wife was having a few of her friends over with all their kids for a playdate and I wanted to make myself scarce. (When I say few I mean four friends, when I say all their kids I mean nine including mine.) Now that’s incentive to get out of the house for a nice long run! Anyway I set out on a mission to go 14km (2km more than the week before) and somewhere along the way I got cocky and decided to go an extra 500m on the out of my out and back route, which, if my math is correct would make it 15km for the day! Everything was going along great, I mean I was struggling a little with the wind as my body shape acts more like a sail than an airfoil and once again the gel pack I had was expired but overall I was doing fine. Fine right up until the 14.5 km mark when I felt a small twinge in my calf, nothing to be too concerned about I thought just some tightness. Only 500m to go what could happen????🙂 Well at 14.75km I felt a pop in my calf and I stopped in my tracks, pulling up lame and possibly uttering the odd curse! Thankfully I was close to home and only had to walk 250m but c’mon! If I had of stuck to my original plan of the 14km this wouldn’t have happened!! I was just really starting to get back into the groove after my back issues and now this! Hopefully it is only a temporary set back and I will be good to go in a week or so but I had a similar problem last year and it took a month to get over!
So what can I learn from this?? Well I guess the running coaches know what they are talking about when they say only increase mileage by 10% at a time. That, and I can assume that the running gods were reading my blog from April 20th when I went from 3km to 5km (an increase of 60%) and confidently wrote “In your face running coaches” and now this is payback. Karma perhaps?? Could be, but a better assumtion would be that I was dumb and went too far too fast and now have to suffer the consequences!
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