Just need to vent a little. Or put thoughts to text. Or whatever. This will be really rambling.
In the last ~month or so, I've managed to Strava-PR my 10K and HM distances on (essentially) training runs. Both I ran with purpose, but not race effort. So my street-running fitness appears to be peaking (trail running is another story, but that's a whole different whiny post).
Over this same month, I've been just running through my glute pain. It's not getting worse, but it would be nice to have a run where I didn't notice it. But you play the hand you're dealt, right? At least it's not getting worse.
What's new is a lower leg injury. It started as barely noticeable, but over the course of the last few weeks, it's been getting worse with every run. Just a little worse with each run, but worse.
Saturday (my unofficial HM PR run) I had double-dosed on Naproxen the night before. Which makes the leg pain immaterial (but still present). The downside of Naproxen is that it screws-up my gut. So I didn't take any on Saturday night. And Sunday, my lower leg pain was the worst it has been, and I was running slow whether I wanted to or not.
It was bad again when I got out of bed this morning, and I tried to diagnose it. It's on the inside of my lower right leg, about halfway up. Definitely not the calf itself. I think it's either achilles or soleus. But hard to be sure.
At the start of this year, I told myself I wasn't going to set an annual distance goal. I wanted to run "better", not "farther". Incorporate some strength work. More speedwork.
Yet
every single week I find myself mentally measuring myself against my old 2020 weekly goal of ~55mi/week. I can't escape it. I can't take an extra day off, because then I'll drop 7mi off my "pace". The "pace" I'm not supposed to be even pursuing.
The annual mileage goal is incredible at getting me out running when I don't want to be. And it's clearly driving me to be more fit. But it's also forcing me to just run through injury. And not want to take more than two rest days a week (when I do strength training).
Anyways, where is all this going?
I'm currently torn between taking a ~week off (to try to let my leg heal), or just trying to run through the injury and load up on more drugs, gut be damned.
And then I had a crazy idea. ???
Since I'm at peak fitness, I was considering trying to find a HM to race. And try to make my PR official. And put a true race effort in.
What if I combined my injury rest with a taper? And race a HM in a week or two?
There's the
Cowtown HM in a couple of weeks near me. But it has a
stupid amount of elevation gain just in the first two miles. Not exactly PR-friendly.
I could easily travel to a different HM. I used to live in the Chicagoland suburbs and there's a
race there (might actually be the same one
@Juxtatarot is targeting). Elevation doesn't appear to be horrible. Also I used to live in Houston, and there's a
race there that's pretty flat. My preference would be to go run the Vegas R&R HM again (the only two HM races I've ever run), but that's not for another year (been moved permanently from a fall race to a spring one, skipping this year). So I could just wait a year and race that again.
So at the end of the day, I really don't know what I'm going to do. Like I said, this is just more venting/rambling than anything else. I'm happy that my fitness is improving, but worried this injury is going to be a repeat of mid-2020 when I had to take a ~month off and regressed like crazy.
Sorry for the long post. And I didn't even touch on my ultra goals for 2021! Hah.