This weekend was supposed to be my last high mileage weekend before rolling into taper town for the Manitoba Marathon on June 15th. The pulled hamstring on Wednesday night put a bit of a damper on the running but I have managed to stay active and get some of the missed mileage back.
I was worried about the hamstring pull because if they are bad they can take weeks or even months to fully get back to healthy. My issue obviously wasn’t that bad as I was able to walk just fine but any kind of longer stride or faster movement caused pretty immediate pain. So while I obviously don’t want any injury I do have to thank my lucky stars that the injury wasn’t worse – especially with the Manitoba Marathon only being 3 weeks away as of this morning.
The hamstring issue has caused me to miss some training mileage obviously. I missed 4.1 out of 10 on Wednesday when I had to stop because of the injury, I missed 5 scheduled miles on Thursday and I was only able to put in a slow 2.53 out of 10 on Saturday morning. Today was the big one though – the 20 miler. I intended to get up very early this morning to attempt it and get the miles in even if I had to walk a good portion. I was obviously exhausted as I wasn’t really conscious of my alarm going off until an hour or so after it was programmed to – I’m not sure if I was hitting snooze on auto pilot or if it was going off the whole time but I apparently needed the sleep. By the time I realized I really didn’t have time to do the 20 miler and still get to some of the other stuff I needed to do so I put in 3 miles on the treadmill nice and slow in order to judge where I stood. After I got through all the other stuff that needed to be done today I was able to go out and give another go. I did a decent paced 8.85 mile run in 1:20:48 with only some aching in the hamstrings plus a few hard shots of pain from them. When I got the little hits of pain I realized my form was off – sorted that out and everything went back to a slight ache and all was good.
If things are feeling good tomorrow morning I will look at putting in the 20 miler then. If I can pull that off I will only be off schedule about 5 miles but getting to the starting line healthy is more important that this last 20 miler so I will have to play it by ear. I have put in a few high distance runs in the past month or so and I am not particularly worried about being able to finish, as long as I am healthy. All that said though it is hard to let a 20 miler go when the race is so close!
I did manage to stay fairly active though over the weekend to try to make up for the reduced running. On Thursday night I did my best to chase the kids on their bikes as an incentive for them to get better at riding without their training wheels. Friday night was the kids swimming lessons so there wasn’t a lot of time there but on Saturday I did a bunch of yard work and clean up in the garage and we got the pool set up for the first swim of the year. We spent a good hour and half splashing around there before the thunder storms rolled in. And today I had to strip all the seats out of the van so that I could go pick up a big ass shed for my sister and brother-in-law, load it in the van, and unload it in our garage for them to pick up later in the week. I also took a big load of stuff to the dump for recycling (including our big washing machine that died on us a couple weeks back). After all that the van needed a good cleaning, so I cleaned all the carpets in the van and gave the interior a good wipe and reloaded all the chairs. So all in all a pretty active weekend which I am sure helped the hamstring get stretched out.
Alrighty – now for a beer and the hot tub for a bit to further relax the muscles. And then to bed to get ready to (hopefully) get that 20 miler done!
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