Running through the tough times
Chris Jennings/Herlad Democrat

I’ve come upon the toughest part of my training plan in the last week. To explain this to it’s fullest I need to go back to last year.

One sunny day after pulling out of the Herald Democrat parking lot on my motorcycle a series of events occurred that ended with my left knee breaking the tail light lens out of a car that had stopped in front of me.

I won’t go into details about the accident except to say it was my fault and I could have avoided it. I never went down, but I did have a good limp for a couple of months. I’m also just stubborn enough that I never went to the doctor.

After an 18 mile run two Saturdays ago my left knee has not been the same. I’m sure it has something to do with that mishap just over a year ago.

What’s been hard about this portion of my training plan is that I finally decided after taking a couple of days off for little injuries and suspected over training that I needed more substantial rest.

It’s been almost two weeks since my last run, and that is killing me. I have been riding my bike some. Actually I’ve ridden it about 40 miles this week which doubles my mileage from all of last year.

The bike does not bother the knee at all, and I even had the bright idea to try and run after a ride on Monday thinking that after I was warmed up it would be better. A few blocks into the run and I decided that wasn’t a good idea. That hurts because I really want to run.

Looking at my training plan I’ve just about come to terms that I will not be ready for a marathon by the end of February. So I have conceded to run the half marathon at cross timbers, I’m pretty sure that I can do that because I’ve already run 12 miles out there a couple of months ago.

The plan is to try and run about five miles on Saturday. That will give me almost two full weeks of rest.

After that I’ll scale down all of my running with a Marathon target date in April.
The Dallas marathon is the next closest marathon and that would give me nine months of training under my belt. Slowing down the mileage increases will hopefully keep me injury free.