The Plunge

I've gone and done it...I actually SIGNED UP for the half marathon on February 17th. That means that, barring injury, I actually have to do this thing or I'm out close to $100.

I'm debating my game plan from here on out, though. After my 9-miler a few weeks ago, I was down for the count the rest of the day and sore for a couple days thereafter. I made a complete recovery and delved right back into the training.

Last week I did a 10-miler and felt wonderful. Any soreness resolved within a couple hours, so I went out and did a Saturday morning spin up to the town green and back (~4.25 miles). THAT killed me. I guess I wasn't as recovered as I thought. My hips have been aching, and I'm very aware of my sciatic nerve.

I made a small investment into a heating pad. I am debating whether to move a cute heating pad cover on Etsy from my "Would Be Nice" list to my "Desperately Must Have in an Urgent Kind of Way" list. In an ever-changing world, one constant is that heating pads will never evolve away from looking downright geriatric.

I'm feeling about 90% better today. My game plan was to do a 4-6 miler tomorrow (I always run on Saturday mornings), and then, amongst my routine shorter runs, do 2 more long training runs in the 11-12.5 range (the first of which I'll do this upcoming Tuesday). However, I'm not sure if I need to take it a bit easier to give my body some rest. I'm weighing options, and any input from runner friends would be helpful:

-Continue as is as long as I wake up feeling alright tomorrow and just hope that it all magically disappears,
-skip tomorrow's run and then pick up with the planned run on Tuesday,
or
-continue with shorter (4-7 mile) runs once or twice a week and just get one more 12ish-mile run in before the half.

For the first time, during my 10-mile run, I felt like I could keep going to 13.1 if I absolutely had to. At this point, I'm just trying to balance maintaining the endurance I've built up vs. staying injury-free.

Come join me on Dailymile.com. Someone got me on there, and I've been enjoying it. It's like a mini Facebook for people who run (and others). You can log all your workouts, and it appears in your friends' feeds much like a Facebook status. I enjoy it but wish my network of friends was larger than two (one of whom isn't very active). :) I also recently discovered the route-mapping feature. I've been mapping out some of my routes to compare them to MapMyRun. I've found that MMR isn't so far off. Where MMR said my 9.9 (aiming for 9), DM mapped it at 9.3. Where MMR said 10.44 (aiming for 10,) DM put it at 9.9. It helps to know that, if MMR is off, it's not off by anything earth-shattering. It'll also be nice to be able to map routes before heading out, rather than just saying "ok, I need to run on this road until my app tells me I've gone this far."

Finally, because no post of late is complete without a pic, what do you think of the compression socks/crops look?

Totally fashion-forward, utterly tragic, or ridiculous, but OWN it?