Out With the Old, In With the New

My New Balance 890v2's have reached their limit. The funny thing is my new pair of shoes are the exact same shoes, just a difference color. I try to change out my running shoes every 400-500 miles. I track all my miles on all of my shoes and have done this ever since I started running. It's kind of a balancing act, really. Because, I try to also run my marathons in a pair of shoes with about 75-100 miles. I did a bulk of my training in the grey New Balance shoes. The new pair of shoes are solid red which match my outfit for the Lakefront Marathon perfectly.

Since the last post was primarily what's to come over the next year, I actually am still racing under my 2012 training plan. Which actually makes sense since it still is 2012. My big race of the year is the Lakefront Marathon on October 7th in Milwaukee. It will actually be my first marathon since the Boston Marathon in April of 2011. I qualified for the Boston Marathon with a time slightly over 3:03 and then ran the race with a time of 3:17. Now, I'm not going to turn this into a race report for a race that was about a year and a half ago, but I was definitely disappointed in that race. I understand completely the accomplishment of running the Boston Marathon, don't get me wrong. Honestly, it was probably my fault for setting such an aggressive goal for a race which required such long travel and difference terrain then Wisconsin. I had the goal of running a sub 3 hour marathon. I think the hills and the fact that majority of my training was done in the dead of winter in Wisconsin held me back from my goal. I have definitely gotten over the fact I didn't reach my goal and and just grateful for the chance to run in one of the most prestigious racing in the world. Anyway, the entire reason for that story is to explain the reason for the sub 3 goal. Also, the fact that this will be the first marathon since April of 2011. My training this summer has gone great! I have done 4, 20 mile runs among many other long runs. I also completed several other track workouts with specific time goals. Everything has gone as planned. Recently however, I have developed a pain in my left medial ankle, just above my malleolus (the "ankle bone"). So, that is starting to worry me. It has held me back on a few of me runs already. It seems if I can ice it regularly and stretch and wrap it up with a compression wrap I can get through my runs pain free. My last long run was this past Tuesday morning. Interestingly enough I ran it after a night of work, after a day of work. See, my job and the fact that I work third shift occasionally requires me to work third shift after a full day of training. We refer to this as doubling back. For instance I will be given off a Sunday night to train 8-4pm on Monday and then come back to work 10-6am on Monday night. So I then ran 21.2 miles in 2:38 after a total of 3 hours of sleep in a 40 hour period. The joys of the job are the fact that I had to go right right back to work from 2-6pm for CPR recertification. Oh yeah....

From here on out its time to taper and really cut back and hopefully recover from what ever is going on in my ankle. So until next time, thanks for reading and following!