Raw = Painful!

Running has been going pretty awesome for me lately. Yay! I haven't been this excited about training in a long time. Actually, I guess I haven't really trained for something in several months, not since Voyageur, so that could be part of it, too. My legs are tired and it makes me super happy! I've been getting really excited for weekends so I can do my long runs. I'm really liking double longs - especially when I do them in the right order and have my road long Saturday and my trial long Sunday. I've done my 'recovery' trail long the day before the run I'm supposed to be recovering for a couple of times and for some reason, it just doesn't work as well! Now, I'm a fairly antsy person and if I stay home too many weekends in a row (generally that just takes more than one!) then I start getting antsy and want to have an adventure. But I've stayed home a few weekends in a row now and am doing fine so the double longs must be staving off the adventure needs. This makes sense since all I really need to fulfill my adventure needs is a trail run up the shore . . . Anyway, I'm happy with where my mileage is at and I'm ready to add more and excited (and scared!) for when pace specific runs start happening. I'm very, very loosely following a training plan but mostly just doing what makes sense to me. I need to start looking at tempos/repeats, though, so I'll look to the Plan for those type of things.

My body seems to be pretty happy with everything and nothing is too upset with the mileage. I think I mentioned that right after I talked about how nice and un-tight my calves were, they instantly tightened up? Well they got REALLY REALLY bad. Tear inducing bad. Having to stop and walk part way up a hill bad. So I decided on a two fold plan - drop running in Vibrams for a while (even though I'm only running in them once a week) and bring my magical Mr. Blue Thing to work with me. The combination seems to have done the trick - huzzah! And having Mr. Blue Thing hanging out in my office gets a decent amount of comments, too. My job is to do things for a ton of different people so I always have people coming and going and so far only one person has known what it was and he's not even a runner! I'm not sure where this leaves me with the Vibrams, though. I'm thinking of maybe waiting until I'm doing shorter runs on trails (right now I really just hit them longer on Sundays) and ease back into them. But how much more 'ease' can I do when I was only at 4-6 miles a week with them? Or it could be entirely that I'm stretching a ton now and Vibrams would be fine . . . It didn't take long for the crazy tight to go away, so I think I'm safe to experiment with adding Vibrams back.

So! You've all heard the manta - don't do anything new on race day, right? Well here is why - you don't want to be 12 miles in when you suddenly notice horrific random chafing that you can do nothing about. Which is what happened to me on Saturday. I rubbed very, very raw kind of just above my arm pit - a good 6 inches long and over an inch wide. Ow. This brought me to a forced three days off of running since I couldn't do a normal arm swinging motion at all - I had to hold my arm out away from my body. I guess it looked pretty funny on our hike that afternoon (you'll notice I still hiking even though I could swing my arm right). I could barely wear a shirt the rest of Saturday and Sunday, I had to wear the softest thing I owned. I probably COULD have run on Tuesday, but ended up deciding one more day to let it heal was better than running and making it really bad again and having to deal with it for a longer time. Sunday, it was all kinds of mean looking, let me tell you. I actually thought about taking a picture but decided that was a little too weird. That didn't stop me from showing it to all of my running friends, though :) I think I figured out the problem, though. My Icebreaker top has a prominent seam that matches the shape of the rawness. Now, I've worn that long plenty of times with a camel so the problem was the rest of the layers. In the first place, I thought it was colder so I wore too much (t-shirt, plus light long sleeve, plus light jacket) so I was sweaty and I had never worn that particular long sleeve with a camel and that jacket before so I think things just got twisted and caught up just right. And then rubbed for almost 3 hours. Ow, ow, ow. So that, my friends, is why you never wear new on race day.