TWO MILES MORE

Old picture from 2012 maybe?

Saturday I decided it was time to go for another run. The first one seemed to be a success, so I looked forward to building on that. Matt and Katie were kind enough to humor me for two miles at a slow pace so we ran a little jaunt from Matt's house that took all of 22 minutes. It was a little slower than my first run back, but it definitely felt easier and I was still able to talk and hold conversation until the very end with an uphill finish.

Anyways, after my first run my knees felt fine, no noticeable effect, but I was very sore afterwards. I likened it to running a half marathon pretty hard back when I was in shape. I'm happy to report I was barely sore at all after this run. So improvement there! A tinsy bit sore, but 95% better than last time. Knees felt the same too, no ill effects whatsoever from the run. Those two miles didn't put a cramp in my style at all. So that is encouraging.

So hopefully the knee braces are working! I haven't had a bad flare up since early November (after wearing the braces during most of the day). They have definitely been sore and whatnot at times, but it hasn't been too bad. So that's a little confusing. It's encouraging, but the knee thing still seems like a mystery. There is a lot of weird auto-immune shit in my immediate family, where your immune system starts attacking your own stuff, I'm almost wondering if the knees are related to that. That's probably a huge leap, but also kind of makes sense given the random nature of the flare ups and the fact they hung around even after doing NOTHING for months on end.

We'll see. Overall I feel things going in a positive direction. So that's encouraging. If I never get back to sub 1:40 halfs and 3:35 fulls I'll be okay. I had my time being "fast" and whatnot, and it was great. If I could just run (more like jog) for basic health I would consider that a win. A few miles a few times a week. Maybe if I am able to do that and my legs starting feeling good again I can slowly ramp it up and see what happens. I'm not super fixated on that though. I just want my body not to be in revolt.

I already signed up for the Miami Half Marathon in January just after finishing that race ten months ago. So I have two months to prepare for that. Luckily, I've been wanting to do it with my friend in Miami and he usually does about 2:45, which is 12:30/mile. We'll likely have another friend joining us looking to run that pace. So I think if I can get a small baseline of fitness back by then, maybe run five miles as a "long run" once or twice, I should be able to finish with them. Actually kind of looking forward to that, it would be a lot fun to do the race with friends.

That's the update. I'll try another run here in the next few days. The weather has turned really crappy so I might do it in the gym, who knows. Just going to keep proceeding cautiously until something changes.