FEBRUARY UPDATE

Last 6 weeks of training (Miami was 1/28)

Oh, hi there! Still running at least three times a week and going to try to hit four more often. I'll need to be running four if I really want to give a marathon this fall my best shot. Better to get in the habit of that now while mileage is still low. However, listening to my body is still top priority. I was able to run four a days last week. I am attempting to do that again this week, but had to rearrange my plans tonight. I was going to run with Sunstone but I was feeling run down and sore. I'm going to try to run tomorrow instead and then still do a long run on the weekend. If I still don't feel great tomorrow I'll scrap it and do just the long run since I already have two weekday runs in.

I'm still struggling with knowing when to push myself and when to lay off the gas. Back when I was really running hard and doing well I would run on sore legs all the time. After a few miles, most the time, you'd warm up and be able to run through it just fine. However, when the psoriatic arthritis started hitting, one of the symptoms I got, along with the knee inflammation, was really bad muscle soreness. It felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my legs at times. So I'm worried to run on sore legs now, afraid it's going to result in some sort of flare and sideline me for a while.

However, I think I need to test it out sooner rather than later. If I'm really going to run a marathon this fall and a four day week has me sidelined... then I have major issues. So I think I just need to go for it and see what happens! The four days last week was no issue! So it could be as simple as my conditioning and still trying to build that mileage. Improvement does not come without discomfort in running, so I'll try to balance that with the need to be diligent about my knees.

Otherwise, I'm still running along and have felt pretty good all told. Looking forward to daylight saving time here in a few weeks, that will put the weekday runs in daylight again, which should be a plus in the motivation department. Hard to be motivated to run in the dark sometimes, but I've bitched about that enough.