Don't wanna be FAT!

Sunday night just walking around my knee was sore from my i.t. band having knots in it so I rolled it out Sunday and Monday, and decided to take Monday off completely.  This morning I ran real easy and it was fine until the last little bit I could feel the i.t. band getting real tight again.  It's nothing serious yet, but I'm going to be ultra conservative this week because I don't want it to become something serious.  I was due for an easy week anyway as the I have been very aggresive in my training for about 5 weeks in a row.  AP:  7:34.  

Ran 3.8 miles up to Roy High's track, 4x100 strides 100m jogging inbetween, 4x200 fast 100m slow jog inbetween, 400m slow jog, 4x200 fast 100m slow jog inbetween, 4.2 mile run home.  1st set of 4x200 splits were 31.8, 31.14, 30.86, 31.38.  2nd set of 4x200 splits were 30.62, 31.44, 31.77, 30.99.  I felt good on these and my leg felt good.  I think I might just be being paranoid about my leg and knee because I'm in real good shape right now and everytime I get into real good shape it seems I get injured.  I hope it's just me being paranoid.  But, I'm experienced enough with injuries that I know that I can't just ignore the pains that I have been having.  I think it might be piriformis syndrome that I'm dealing with and not my i.t. band like I originally thought.  I've had a little bit of knee pain on the outside of my knee which made me think it was my i.t. band, but I have also had some real bad lower back pain at times and some tingly pain up and down the back and outside part of my leg and real tightness in the right buttocks which makes me think it's the piriformis flaring up and causing pains up and down my sciatic nerve.  Any thoughts or advice????

Easy run. Felt pretty good. There were times where my knee hurt just a little bit but the last 6 miles or so felt just fine.  I think it's getting better.  

3.5 mile warm-up, 8 mile tempo, 3.5 mile cool-down. My leg felt good, but this was not a great run. I felt like I was going as fast as I could the whole time but was unable to run as fast as I thought I should have been able to. I was glad I didn't run the strider's half marathon because I would have gotten my butt kicked on this particular day.  Splits for the tempo run were:  5:20, :16, :21, :21, :25, :20, :23, :41.  AP:  5:23.  I was hoping I could average between 5:15-20  and not feel like it was an all out effort.  Oh well I would rather have an off day now than in a couple of weeks.  I'm just glad my leg is holding up.  

I felt better this morning than I have in a couple of weeks. The leg feels like it almost completely back to normal. I plan on doing a real hard workout tomorrow which will really test it. I felt pretty comfortable today which made me very happy because I have been real concerned.  AP:  6:53.  

Great job to everyone that ran the Striders Half this past weekend!  I was really impressed with how competitive it was when I looked at the results yesterday! 

Real strong workout this morning. 2.5 mile warm-up, 15 mile AB, 2.5 cool-down. AP for 15 miles was 5:26.73.  Mile splits were:  5:22, :23, :33, :27, :25, :28, :28, :27, :33, :22, :25, :18, :30, :35, :25.  I ended at the same place I started so it was an honest course.  It's amazing the difference a few days can make.  I felt really good and my legs felt pretty good.  

Afterwards I used a certificate I had won at that small St. Patty's day race to get some Positional Release Therapy (PRT) done on my piriformis.  It was interesting.  So far I feel like it may have helped.  Time will tell.  

Nice and easy recovery run. AP: 7:00

Opted to wait another day before doing a hard work out in order to recover more from Tuesday's workout. My right leg which had the piriformis issues is feeling completely better, but now I have a pain on the outside of my left leg just a couple inches above the ankle.  I iced that this morning after my run.  Anybody have any ideas of what that might be and how else to treat it?   It doesn't feel like something that I have to worry about becoming a huge issue, but again something I should pay attention to.  AP:  6:51.   

After posting on Thursday, the pain above my left ankle worsened. By the end of the day Thursday I was limping just walking around. So I decided to give it a rest from Friday to Sunday. It is feeling just fine now and both legs felt like they were back to normal this morning.  Today's run was good.  AP:  7:12.  

3.75 mile warm-up, 4x100 strides, 12x400m w/ 60 seconds walking recovery, 3.75 mile cool-down. 400 meter splits were: 71:45, 69:56, 71:31, 71:24, 71:30, 71:45, 70:42, 71:61, 69:57, 70:96, 70:03, 67:06 (on this last one I ran the same pace that I had been running all the others in until the last 100 meters then I kicked it in).  Plan was to do 10x400m in 72-73 pace, but it felt so easy running what I was running from the start that I kept it there and decided to do a couple more.  I was hoping it would feel easy because this was meant as a tune-up for Saturday.  My legs actually felt better after the run than they did before.  I'm excited to race on Saturday!

Started tapering for the Salt Lake 1/2 marathon today. Nice and easy run. Legs feel good. AP: 6:58.

Nice to sleep in a little longer this morning. Easy 7. AP: 7:08

Easy run.  Mixed in 4 strides.  Excited to race tomorrow morning. Not excited to wake up at 4:45 a.m.  

I've got mixed feelings about this race. On one hand I am very discouraged because going into the race given the elevation profile and where I thought my current fitness level was I thought for sure I would be able to at the very least go under 1:09.  But, on the other hand I know that the course was a little long and everyone I talked to said they thought the course was a lot harder than then they thought it was going to be.  I felt the same way.  I was very surprised at the difficulty of the course.  I was also thrilled to take 4th place given the level of competition.  Even if I had the race I was hoping to have I don't think I would have been able to place any higher than 4th the three that beat me were just better than me it's as plain and simple as that.  I went a little harder and faster than I probably should have gone on some of those downhill miles from miles 3-5.  It was nice to have company for the first 6 miles or so and then it got incredibly lonely for the rest of the race.  Here are my mile splits based off of the mile markers on the course:  5:19, 5:38, 4:56, 5:07, 4:21 (Not sure why this one was so far off I know I didn't drop a 4:21 mile on the 5th mile though.), 11:20 (next 2 miles, I missed the mile marker), 5:50, 5:28, 5:34, 5:15, 5:35, 5:23, :37 for the last .1.   Cooled down 4 miles with Ben, Mike, Scott, and Justin.  It was fun to see a lot of you bloggers at the race.  Many had great races! 

I was super sore this morning from Saturday's race.  Just took it nice and easy.  I started feeling a little better about 3 miles into the run.  AP:  7:38.  

Legs were feeling much better today. Watching and following local runners yesterday running Boston got me psyched up and motivated to keep at it.  AP:  6:51.  

4 mile warmup, strides, 3x800(200m jogging rest about 1:15), 4.5 mile cool down. Not the best workout. I was hoping to at least get 4 or 5 in, but the effort felt like a strong effort to do the 3 I did and I would like to perform well Saturday in the thanksgiving point tulip festival half so I called it good after 3. Splits were 2:24, 2:28, and 2:28. Not sure why they felt hard...probably still recovering from the SLC half.

Nice easy run. AP: 7:12

Nice and easy run just tried to keep it slower than 7:00 pace.  Legs are finally feeling fully recovered and just in time.  

I really enjoyed the weekend at Thanksgiving Point with my family.  I thought it was great that the race packet included two flex passes that admitted you into all of the venues at Thanksgiving Point.  We spend the day yesterday taking the kids to the farm, ancient life museum, and the gardens.  We then stayed at the Marriott at Thanksgiving Point because I had an e-certificate that I needed to use by June.  I woke up at about 5:45 so I could get some breakfast in me and take care of business on the toilet.  I was nervous this morning because I couldn't go near as much as I normally do on race mornings and thought that I was going to need to stop in the race.  Luckily that was not an issue.  I ran about a 2.5 mile warm-up and did some strides and then some of the heavy hitters started showing up at the starting line. There was Brett, Jon K, Jace, Scott K., Jon H.  I knew then that it was going to be very difficult to win some cash.  We headed out in a pack with Brett leading the way through the first mile.  After the mile marker Brett picked up the pace considerably and Jon K. was the only one to go with him.  I started to go with him but quickly decided the pace was too heavy for me to handle, so I dropped back and joined Jace and Scott.  Somewhere partway into that mile Scott started dropping off which surprised me, but I later learned that he was battling some calf issues and ultimately ended up dropping out of the race (sorry Scott!)  Jace and I stayed close to each other through 3 miles.  Then I gapped him just a little.  The gap stayed minimal for a while so I decided to let him catch up with me so we could work together, hoping that we might eventually catch up with Jon who we could see was falling off of Brett at this point.  Jace and I stayed close and worked together and I think we closed the gap a little bit on Jon over through 7.5-8 miles then Jace started to gap me.  He gapped me by about 20 meters at one point and then I decided I really needed to work hard to get back up there with him soon or I was going to get dropped so I really worked hard over the next mile to get back up to him.  In the mean time Jon was opening his large gap on us again and I knew we weren't going to get him so it was going to be a tough battle between me and Jace for 3rd place and the $150.00.  It was at about mile 9 that I finally caught back up to Jace.  When I pulled up next to him he suggested that we make thing much more pleasant on each other and agree to split the $150 evenly and run the last 4 miles together so we could both ease up a little and not have to duke it out with each other.  Having just made a big move to catch him I was more than happy to agree to the deal knowing that after a big move like that I wasn't going to have much in me to battle over the final 4 miles.  So we cruised in together and determined from about 3 miles out that we wouldn't race until the final turn which only left about 75-100 meters.  I thought for sure Jace would have no problem outkicking me because anybody that knows Jace knows that he has some wheels!  However, today I was really able to get rolling and actually outkicked Jace, barely.  Overall, it was a really fun race.  I loved how pretty it was and I was super impressed with how Kendall Wimmer put on the race and how he catered to the elite runners.  I definitely would like to make this race an annual tradition.  My mile splits were all over the place but that is to be expected on a course like this one.  Those of you that have run the course know what I mean.  They were as follows:  5:24, 5:27, 5:10, 5:22, 6:05, 5:08, 5:34, 5:41, 5:36, 5:31, 5:50, 5:45, 6:6:05 (for last 1.1).  After the race I ran back up to the hotel and did my cool down on the hotel treadmill because it was so wet outside. 

Easy run.  Everything felt good except for my left calf.  Left calf was pretty tight.  AP:  7:13.

Ran this one in the afternoon because I couldn't get out of bed in the morning after being up for over half the night with a screaming baby.  Decided to run this one just a little out of my comfort zone.  This wasn't a tempo or power run by any means but the whole time I felt like I was putting forth a decent effort and it so it wasn't an easy or recovery run.  AP:  6:36.  

I felt really tight for the first two mile but loosened up after that and felt pretty darn good.  Still a little soreness in the left calf, but it is doing much better.  AP:  6:55.