Thursday, October 4, 2007

You can train too hard...believe me!!!

You could say I thought it was a good idea to sign up to do the Berryman Adventure Race during my training for the Memphis Marathon coming on Dec 1. Adventure racing is all about endurance; wouldn't it make sense that putting the 2 events together in a training schedule might work and even help.

After 2 months of training...biking and running...last weekend was the adventure race and i was really nervous but felt physically ready. The fact that we had to orienter the entire race and get our own water were very scary things, but had no problems with that. During the race all I worried over was twisting an ankle or falling off my bike and scraping myself up. After 53 miles of orienteering, mountain biking and canoing (with our bikes) I made it without any major injuries just very sore legs.

As I should have....I recovered for 2 full days and then did a 3 mile slow jog. The next day I was scheduled to complete a 10 miler and felt great (even at an 8:30 min. mile pace) until MILE 9....AHHHHH, that damn mile 9...when my IT band started to tighten up and started hurting so bad I had to stop to stretch. One would think your brain would kick in and decide to walk home from there but my competitiveness came a knocking (since I was running with Robert and I had bragged about my knees not causing me problems at all on the race) and I continued on.

Now the knee pain is back...remember long ago (see first entries) when I had to bow out of the Dallas Marathon about 2 years ago...well it was that same pain. My choice then was to try and run my long runs through the pain and that just really didn't work.

That is the decision now: there is an 18 miler schedule for this weekend.....do I run it or not. Do I run a shorter run and push on to the 20 in two Saturdays???

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