Went too hard
Plantar fascia in my left foot is flaring up. I’m not going to panic quite yet and I’m going to try to be smart about this and stay off it for a few days before doing anything hard with my legs. I have huge, crazy plans for Monday afternoon. So the goal is for it to feel okay by Sunday.
So yeah, I way overdid it. I had my 50 miler on June 2nd. then last weekend we did our annual trip to the Mountain Games in Vail. This time I actually participated by running a fairly chill 5k Friday afternoon and a not-chill-at all 10k Sunday morning. My legs felt trashed for the 5k - remnants from the previous weekend. But it went ok.
Strong placing but this wasn’t a super serious race. Not bad for a trail race starting at 8200 feet, though.
The 10k is probably, mile for mile, the most difficult race I’ve ever run. Not just tons of climbing, but tons of very steep climbing (25%+ grade). Then technical single track downhills and a quad destroying steep finish. It was REALLY hard but a ton of fun. I pushed my ass off for the entire race.
Not the same great placement, but there were serious runners in this race.
That’s all good and I felt okay coming home from Vail. That’s when I screwed things up. My big resolution coming out of the North Fork 50 is to get stronger. So I started doing intense body weight strength workouts again. Monday I ran 10 miles (the day after a race, not a great choice) then immediately went into a strength workout. Tuesday was the opposite - strength first thing in the morning then a 6 mile run over lunch. the run was supposed to be easy, but i screwed up and pushed way too hard.
That was the big mistake. But even then I hadn’t quite gone over the edge. That happened yesterday morning with an hour+ of basketball before work on what needed to be a complete rest day. Yesterday afternoon my left foot really started to hurt. So I’ve been taking advil, icing, and resting since then. Icing makes it feel much better so hopefully I can keep it happy enough to recover quickly. i can probably use a few days off to leg my muscles recover from 4 days in a row of intense strength work.
I don’t really care about training plans between now and Monday. But I’m planning a huge trail run for Monday afternoon. 20+ miles, 6000 feet of climbing. But I need to be smart about this and have the willpower to bail on if it my foot doesn’t get better. It’s much better to miss a week or two now than miss the rest of the season due to plantar fasciitis. These are the times when I would benefit from a coach.
