The hamstrings in my right leg were bugging me all day today – I don’t know if I tweaked them during last night’s run or if the chairs at the training course I am on are messing with them.
I suspect the problem was last night’s run – I caught myself not running properly on the treadmill and that would have meant my form was off and could have resulted in the hamstring issue. The chairs at the training course aren’t helping though, but neither is sitting in general – any time I sat longer than 20 minutes today I would have tightness and tenderness in the hamstrings when I stood up. I would then need to walk it out for a bit and they would seem ok – not great but ok.
So that gave me a dilemma for the run tonight – push hard to try to redeem my lapse on yesterday’s run or take it easy and rest the leg. There was also the possibility I would start to run and just not be able to.
I couldn’t really decide what to do until I tried to run in the first place so I got on the treadmill and tried a couple minutes at a slow and steady 6 mph. That seemed ok so I pushed up to 7 mph for a couple minutes. That was also ok. So I tried 8 mph for a couple minutes – I could feel the hamstrings tightening and protesting a bit – not horribly but enough that pushing faster did not seem wise.
I kept it at that speed for about 6 minutes before I felt the leg needed a bit of a rest – I then backed off to 7 mph and the hamstring seemed to loosen up – did 7 mph for 4 minutes and then pushed up to 8 mph for 6 minutes. At that point the hamstrings were getting tight and sore again so I went back down to 7 mph for 4 minutes again before pushing up to 8 mph for another 6 minutes.
I continued those 4 minutes at 7 mph and 6 minutes at 8 mph cycles until I hit the hour mark and about 7.6 miles.
At this point the hamstrings still felt ok so instead of backing off I decided to push faster to see if I could get to my scheduled 8 miles in under 63 minutes. So I bumped the speed to 8.5 mph for 2 minutes and then pushed up to 9 mph for the last 53 seconds.
All in all a good run despite having hamstring issues and being in a training course all day (with all the sitting involved). I managed to avoid any of the holding onto the treadmill issues I had yesterday for a clean run as well which is good. Gives me a bit of redemption from last night at least.
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