life on the edge
Endurance athletes often talk about riding that edge between the most high-quality training that you can handle and getting hurt. I may have pushed it a touch too far last week -- something in the neighborhood of my left knee has been hurting intermittently since last Tuesday. My first thought is IT band but we'll see what my physical therapist says tomorrow.
It felt a bit sore during an easy treadmill run on Tuesday, then it felt fine during a very tough track workout on Wednesday -- but part of that could have been that the intense pain I felt throughout my body from the difficulty of the workout masked any other pain until I cooled down, when my knee/ITB felt funky again. I stayed of of it until Saturday -- one swim Thursday, an easy ride Friday -- before attempting the Saturday morning track workout. It felt so-so during warm-up and I made it through the first mile of a 2x2mile before finally deciding that this was a bad idea.
I've been using the foam roller and the tiger tail a few times each day and I'm hoping that this bit of rest will let me run pain-free, or at least tolerably, in Seoul on Sunday. My fitness in all three disciplines is on the up-and-up, so I hope that I don't have to settle for a swim-bike-shuffle.
Sorry for the downer of a post. Hopefully I'll have something more upbeat to say tomorrow! Some more positive nuggets from recent training:
- I did a lap of the Lake Stevens 70.3 bike course this past Sunday -- that was pretty cool. My parents just bought a house that is like 2 miles off the course, so I hope to know that bike route like the back of my hand by the time that race rolls around.
- I saw some very encouraging wattage numbers in my VO2 workout today. Fun stuff.
- The aforementioned "really hard" track workout involved three intervals on/near the Lower Woodland oval. The first involved 3 laps around the track targeting 76, then running off the track to a nearby paved hill and pushing it up over the top... about 5:30 of very hard running. The second interval was just a mile on the track in about 5:00. The third interval again started with 3/4 mile on the track but then we went up a much longer hill and tacked on this loop at the top for a total of nine minutes of suffering. Well, the three laps on the track weren't too bad but once we started climbing it was a purely mental exercise -- the body was just gone.