Scheduling.

With my recent re-injury, I was starting to get a little overwhelmed by our training schedule.  The last training run I was able to do (non-elliptical) was 4 miles.  This weekend we were slated to run 7 miles.  That's a 3 mile jump, and my leg isn't exactly healed. I started finding that all I could think about was how far behind I was getting, how many miles I wasn't running, and how I was holding us back as a team.  This was getting really frustrating and it was starting to make me angry.

We tried water running on Wednesday morning - super low impact, a great cross-training option as an alternative to running, especially with an injury. At the time it didn't seem hard, but when we finished I could feel it everywhere. The only downside is that I had hoped to have done it in deep water so my leg had literally no ground impact.  At 4:30am, Lifetime only has the indoor pools open, and then only go 4 ft.  So, my leg was unhappy later that day, therefore Abby was unhappy later in the day. However, my anger fueled good weight lifting that afternoon, so at least that was successful. By last night, I had calmed down, relaxed a bit, and realized I needed to regroup. Again.

I've seen a lot of articles about modifying training schedules, but for some reason, this was a hard concept for me to grasp. I was determined to keep our training schedule set in stone.  However, it's been a busy couple of weeks, we've been tired and/or sick, so we were already starting to modify things.  Despite my hesitation to pull the training mileage back, yesterday at the gym, I realized I had no option but to adjust it.  In talking with Christi, it turned out to be a good solution for both of us.  The entire point of having this long training schedule is so we can modify it to meet our needs each week. It's not set in stone; there is no harm in making adjustments.  We luckily were about to do several weeks at 8 miles, so we decided to build up one mile per week for 5, 6, 7, and 8 miles, and then be back on track and back on schedule.

My main goal is to focus on running the long run. If my leg is hurting, then my short run and interval run of the week will be cross training with lots of resistance, and extra focus on strengthening the surrounding muscles.   I'm not going to be out of shape just because my leg isn't cooperating.  I will run this race and at least be in the best shape I can possibly be.