Know When to Head Home

Today was a hill work out. I was planning on a 2.25 mile warm-up, about 6 miles of the hill work out, then 2.75 mile cool down. But there was nothing cool about today. OK, so I'm a little spoiled with Colorado Summers, but it was in the mid 80's - hot enough to mean times were gonna suffer. Or maybe it was me that was gonna suffer...

I did decide to carry water today - anything over 9 miles and I generally do carry water, and especially if it's warm. The warm up went well, and I was very ready for the hills. My hill work out circuit goes like this:

• 0.5 miles up hill, with 20 seconds of bounding, 1 minute jogging, 20 seconds of springing, 1 minute jogging, 20 seconds of high knees, and the rest of the uphill is jogging.
• At the top, I do a relatively flat 0.5 mile recovery jog.
• Then I head back down the hill at somewhere near 10K pace.
• At the bottom, I do another relatively flat 0.5 miles, with 3 20 second strides.
  
• Repeat 2 more times.

Today because of the heat, I took a 30 second break to stand in the shade and drink some water before beginning each circuit. I'm really glad I took the water. There was one thing I forgot, however. When running in a tank top, I usually apply some Body Glide to my right arm, because it always gets chafed against my torso just a couple of inches down from my arm pit. About 0.4 miles in to the run I realized I forgot to put it on. Oh well, I decided to get chafed rather than double back.

And I did.

All three circuits went pretty well and the times were fairly consistent. But when I started in to my cool down run, I noticed a pain at the top of my right shin - just an inch below the knee cap, and sore on both sides of the shin. I decided to see if it would work itself out, then after about 0.5 miles I decided to cut the cool down short. There's pain from working hard (like when doing the drills going up the hill) and there is pain when things are not quite right (like this pain in my shin). You have to learn to tell the difference. You get better by pushing through the first kind of pain. You get injured by pushing through the second kind of pain.

Turns out that after about a 1.25 miles, the pain seemed to have subsided, but it wasn't worth taking the chance so I stuck to my shortened cool down. I finished with 9.8 miles over all, and feeling pretty good. I had some recovery chocolate milk (I crave that stuff toward the end of my more intense runs), did my post work out stretches and settled in for an afternoon of work.

Doesn't get much better. And it's not every run I can claim that I was smart. I have this tendency to over do things. Maybe it's age. Or maybe I am getting a little smarter.