Exhausted

After this weekend theres only a few words to describe how I feel, "exhausted" and "pooped" are probably the best. I felt pretty good this morning, but it hit me square in the face about halfway through the day; that zombie-like feeling we get on days we get 3 hours of sleep and can't seem to find any caffeine. The only difference is, I got 8 hours of sleep last night, and took a nap yesterday, and the day before!

I'm going to go ahead and plead guilty and admit to a little bit of over training, who's surprised? Not me! This week was a planned recovery week anyways, so I'm just going to take it extra easy. The game plan is to cut back the miles to about 60% of usual, and get some extra sleep. I canceled my morning group runs and decided a few extra hours of sleep is good for me.

I'll be honest too and admit there is a little kink in my left hip. It feels a ton better than it did this morning, so I'm not too worried; but another reason to take it easy this week! I self diagnosed myself with a minor case of tendinitis in my left hip, and did a little reading. The cause is due to putting in a lot of miles while having a weak core. The solution is to get back on top of my ab workouts, and complement them with some exercises for my lower back. Also, since its a tendon issue again, I gotta get on top of eating a lot of fruits and veggies since they help heal up tendons and ligaments.

Heres a brief summary of problems I've had recently and solutions that work for me:

• Knees: Extra, and correct stretching seems to completely alleviate my knee problems.
• Ankles: Once again, stretching helps. I'm also keeping on top of some ankle strengthening exercises to beef up what my sister calls my "sissy girl ankles."
• Hip: Hey, guess what: stretching. On top of that, core strength training to help stabilize everything.
• Shins: Do I really need to say stretching again? Also, once I started doing a warm up and cool down with every hard run my shin problems completely dissipated.

Today I also did what I always do on rest days. Thats right, I looked at running stuff online during my office hours. I started gandering around for some ultras to do next year, and one jumped out and bit me in the face! I'm already planning a fairly 'easy' (relative term) 50k for January 12th. Although there is another much more challenging one on February 23rd, which is mostly on single track and has some serious hills. Its the Mount Cheaha 50K Trail Run, check out this elevation chart! I think this would be a great test run to see if I've really got what it takes to do the Pikes Peak Marathon in August of 2008.

My race calendar is getting pretty packed, but I should have a month or so to take it relatively easy and heal up after Chicago. So far it looks like I'll have races: Jan 12, Feb 23, April 21, August (??), and probably something in the fall. All of this is definitely subject to change, based on how injury free I can stay. This also shows how (overly) optimistic I am, although I'm not chiseling any of this into my wall just yet, I could easily cancel any of these based on the circumstances that come up.

Happy running!

-Doug