Non-Injuries (ish)

I have been working like a beast to keep myself injury free as I'm ramping up the miles on Pfitz' marathon training program.  And so far so good.  Sort of.

The number of NON-injury-injuries I've had this past week are through the roof.  It started on Wednesday's early morning mid-week long run.  10 on the schedule.  It was one of the most amazing runs I've had in a long time.  I had some minor chafing (or so I thought) towards the end, but nbd.  Until I got home, and realized my right thigh was absolutely shredded.  I wore a skirt to work, and it was unbearable.  I complained so much that a co-worker found a gauze pad for me to throw on top of it.

(This was the LEAST angry it looked. Finger included for size reference.  Owie.)

I took a rest day Thursday to let it dry out and scab up.  Friday I wore my super shorty short booty shorts for my tempo run before work.  I know a lot of people go with longer shorts to keep chafing away, but my legs rubbing together don't cause issues.  I have enough natural lubrication in the form of sweat to keep that from happening.  (I also used body glide to be safe.)  (Did I just use the term natural lubrication in my blog?  Yes... yes I did.)  My issues is from my legs rubbing with any sort of fabric or seam in between them.  Needless to say, I had a stellar tempo run, no thigh issues.   However, I ended the run with a plethora of blisters on my feet.  Most were small water blisters.  But one on the inside of my big toe was ginormous.  And partially a blood blister.

I did some doctor work on the blister Friday after work--poke, drain, bandage, only to find it was full again a couple of hours later.  Usually my blisters just look bad, and don't hurt at all, but not this bugger.  Ouch.  I continued to pop and re-drain before and after runs throughout the weekend.

Saturday I wasn't thinking when I set out for my recovery run.  I threw on shorts and a tank because it was sunny.  Since my thigh chafing had scabbed, I figured I'd be fine with whatever.  I still used body glide, because clearly I learned that all important lesson.  Well wouldn't you know it, I managed to chafe OFF the chafing scab!!  Holy effing ouch.  Fairly certain I will have a nice scarred reminder on my inner thigh of the time that my Lululemon shorts and I were above body glide and chafing.  We were so wrong running gods, plz forgive.

THEN Saturday night I started to feel something tight in my neck.  I tried to massage it out.  (And coerced Kyle in to giving it a hand.)  But no success.  I went to bed with dreams of a delightful long run swimming through my head.  I woke up in the middle of the night in so much pain, I couldn't even lift my head without using my hands to do the work.  I popped some ibuprofen and tried to fall back asleep.  My alarm went off at 5:30am, and my neck was still throbbing, so I turned off my alarm and fell back asleep.  9am I woke up, popped some more ibuprofen and worked on getting ready for my long run.

Naturally since I'd waited to mid-morning to get out there, it was super steamy and miserable by the time I actually started to run.  But the good news, other than not being able to look left for oncoming traffic/bikers/etc without turning my full body to the left, it managed to loosen up a bit, and continued to loosen during my shower after the run, and I was able to sleep through the night without ibuprofen.

But hey, at least it's not my IT band, hips, and/or knees, right??

Shorts in January FTW

Hello chafing my old friend....
You've come to destroy my thighs again....
(to be song to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence).

I think I may have figured out a very important component to inner thigh chafage: I only chafe when I'm not pouring sweat.  Ergo, my sweat is equal to, if not greater than Body Glide in awesomeness, and I should bottle it up and market it.  Screw Scarves for PRs, we're talking JerBear Shares Her Sparkly Sweat (for a nominal fee, obvs).
_____________

I finally got out for my first run of 2012 yesterday.  Just savoring the big ol' goose egg in my running log as long as possible I guess.  However, when the temp was still in the 40's at 8pm, I had no choice but to head out for some miles.  My legs were still pretty tight from my long run since I had failed to do a shake out run the day after... or any run at all until Wednesday, and my left calve was sir cranky pants.  The last mile and a half my legs finally felt good.

But even better, I got to run in shorts!  In January!  At night time!  It was kind of amazing.

And tonight I got some company on the first couple of my run when Kyle wanted to join me.  Yippee!  Even better news was that he thought it was a lot easier than last week's run.  I think I'm going to keep a training log of Kyle's runs and surprise him with something cool when he gets to 100 miles.  I remember how big of a deal it was when I hit 100 miles the first time I started tracking my mileage.  And I still have the Fossil watch I bought myself as a reward.  And the Brett Favre Jersey for the 200th mile.  Ha.

I had planned to just do some easy miles, but then realized I wouldn't have a hard run this week outside of my long run.  Since the route is fairly hilly, I decided I would run the hills hard and recover on the downhills and straightaways.  It was actually pretty fun and was enough variety that it kept my mind entertained.  And I swear to you, some of those hills were like 4-5 blocks long.  That's a big hill for this "I heart running on the prairie" girl.  I managed to average a 9:05 on the solo portion of my run.

Edited to add:  After I hit publish I realized this was my 500th post.  I think I had planned to do something special for it, for you all, but obviously I didn't.  Remind me in a month, maybe I'll do a random something since I suck.