Sunday, January 13, 2013

Muscle spasms, cramped toes and dog-tired

Post run photo taken at the Running Room!

I am dog-tired.  Not sure where that figure of speech came from because I can assure you, my dog is not tired.  He is sleeping on his double bed in my guest room right now...but trust me he's good. He went for a nice long leisurely walk today and ate some turkey mixed with kibble, but other than that, he took it pretty easy today.  Me on the other hand?  I ran my longest distance to date. 16K!!!!!!!  That's right.  I ran 16 kilometers.  That's 10 miles for my American friends.  Ten freaking miles!  A year ago I weighed just under 250 pounds and never dreamed I could run around my block let alone 10 miles.  See what you can do with perseverance and determination?  Anything you want, that's what!

Friday I went to my massage therapist and he spent one hour just working on my glute, hamstring, quad and the hip flexors on my left side.  Turns out we were able to pin point the area of my pain. My piriformis muscle. I'm not gonna lie.  It hurt like a (insert expletive here).  He used his elbows on my glutes and kneeled on the floor beside me for better leverage.  WTF?  He's a big guy!  When I drove to work afterwards (Hamilton to Toronto = 75K), my butt really hurt.  Almost like it was bruised.

Yesterday I ran a quick 6K in the morning after my hubby hauled his ass out of bed.  I ran around in a lot of circles and just in my neighborhood, but gotter done.  Boring run, but served it's purpose. I'm listening to some new smut on my MP3 player, so it was virtually painless and I may have tacked on an extra kilometer because I wanted to hear what would happen next.  Shameful I know. Please don't judge me.

This morning when I woke up, it was pouring rain here in the Hammer.  I got up before six in anticipation for my long run because I actually wake up at 5:30 every morning.  Don't ask me why. I just do.  When I was running on my own, I had to get up early 3 days a week to do my runs before work, so that is now permanently programmed into my hardware.  Sucks, but there's nothing I can do about it now.  Anywho, my gal Dawn texted me at 7:30am asking if I wanted to delay the run until 1pm.  Hell yes!  Tanya already texted me saying she'd have to put off the run until the afternoon and it was pouring rain.  Now if I had to, I would run in the rain.  After all, I'm a runner for God's sake!  But if given an out?  I'm gonna take it.  So the "Back of the Rat Pack Girls"(a name I came up with because we're usually at the back on Sundays), met at the Running Room and did our run together.  Now, that's a cool name I penned.  It would be even cooler if we smoked and drank hard liquor.  Probably wouldn't be able to complete our runs though...

We did our 16K long run today with a ginormous hill thrown in.  Anyone who has ever run the Around the Bay will tell you that the last hill is a doozy.  Seriously, it never ended.  I'm proud to say I ran the entire hill.  Proud and probably a bit stupid.  My piriformis muscle...or maybe my glute is screaming right now.  And I got horrible cramps in my toes when I reached the top of the hill.  I wonder if I need orthotics.  Something else I should get checked out.  What really sucked was that we still had 4 more kilometers to run after the hill.  Between my leg muscle in spasm and my toe cramps, I did not have a good last 4K run.  Oh well, it's over now and that's all that matters. On a positive note, the weather was beautiful.  It was 11 degrees Celsius (51.8 Fahrenheit) and mostly sunny.  A runner's dream!

My running socks...just in case I forget which foot is which.