Embarrassing running story

Luckily I have no problem laughing at myself when I do something mildly or exceptionally embarrassing. Well, today I did one of those things. So normally I go out for runs in the morning because the roads aren't full of traffic and the city is calm and quiet. Quite frankly it's relaxing to go out for runs in the morning. But recently the weather's been warmer and running in the afternoons after work has become increasingly tempting. So today I went out for a run after work. So there I am running along, going at a nice easy pace. Then BAM! I trip and next thing you know I'm crashing onto the ground. We're not talking a soft landing here. We're talking a hard crash of the concrete sidewalk meeting my palms followed by a roll onto my back. I sit up, look down, and find the culprit: a loose shoelace. I think to myself, "You have got to be kidding me." I get up, laughing, and some guy running in the other direction asks if I'm okay. Then the two girls behind him were laughing and said, "Don't worry, no one saw that. Just everyone staring at you right now." The one day I go for a run in the afternoon and this is what happens. Awesome. Haha, thank God I can laugh at myself.

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Race course announced

Entering into Week 8, training has been going well. We had our first group hill workout this past Saturday out in Waltham, MA. We ran a decent 6-mile loop chock-full of hills. Ain't nothing gonna stop us come June 27! Speaking of June 27, the race course for the Inaugural 13.1 Boston has been announced and can be found at the race's website here. The course is not too far south of Boston in Milton. Being outside of Boston, I'm betting the course fairly scenic considering you can drive just a few miles north, south, or west from the city and be surrounded by trees. I'm sure the people putting the course together did a great job and I'm looking forward to running it.

I'm still tapering off of the prednisone, which I've been on since January. First I was on 40mg/day, then I tapered down to 15mg/day. But then I relapsed again so I had to go back to 40mg/day, and now I'm back down to 15mg/day again. I'm feeling really good this time around. Well, I'm feeling normal as opposed to kind of iffy. The second time around I stayed at the 40mg/day level for a few weeks. I wanted to make sure that my Crohn's was actually in remission as opposed to a suppressed relapse only to come back to haunt me a few weeks later. I have an appointment with my gastro in May sometime, so hopefully I will be back in remission and off the prednisone by then. Gah, I can't wait!

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Recovery

Yup, I know. I know I haven't posted in, well, forever and a day. So I thought that now since I've caught up on a bunch of things I postponed until "after the MCAT" that I'd make a post and update you all on everything.

Well, the big news is that I decided to go ahead and take this past week off from running. While it's not exactly the greatest thing in the world to take a week off from running while training for a half-marathon, I know I need to let my body heal before things progress and get worse. I don't know if being on prednisone since January has anything to do with my knee and/or my Achilles, but the good news is that I'm almost half-way done with my taper and should be off the prednisone completely in just a few weeks. I'm so excited to be off that stuff, you have no idea.

Regardless about the prednisone issue, I have to say that I've been really good about trying to recover as fast as possible. I've been icing both my knee and my ankle consistently now, twice a day everyday, and I'm feeling like I'm back to normal again. But I'm still going to skip out on the 5-mile race coming up this weekend. It'd be pretty silly of me to go directly from being injured to running a long-distance race without any kind of running in between. So all in all I won't be racing on Sunday. I'm going to look into finding another race of some sort between now and the half-marathon in June. Preferably I'd like to find a 10k or a 5-mile race. I think with a 10k I could get an accurate feel for how to pace myself during the actual half-marathon, which would definitely be beneficial for me because I've never run a half-marathon before. But for right now I need to focus on getting better and getting back in the game.

But just because I'm not running this week doesn't mean that I'm not training. I started myself on a new weight lifting program, and to be honest it is absolutely kicking my ass. I love it. I've also been doing some knee strengthening exercises and calf exercises to help get my knees and Achilles stronger.

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