3 days to the Hershey Half Marathon

 

The road has been long, the runs has been long, the work outs have been difficult, the injuries have been there, and now after 4.5 months of training, the Hershey Half Marathon is 3 days away. I need to do a quick mental review for myself, just to remind myself that I have done all the work I needed to do well.

My Map My run said that I have done 300 miles of running, interval training, walking and hiking. 300 miles seems like such a huge number!

Injuries (All self-diagnosed)

Shin Splints, left posterior- I had not known pain such as that of shin splints! It came about after I increased my mileage too fast.  I went from comfortably running 3 miles to 5, almost overnight. Icing, streching and compression sleeves fixed me up. The icing helped so much more than I could imagine.

Bruised rib- As I was learning how to breathe and my lungs were learning to expand while running long distances and hills I bruised my ribs. It hurt to take a deep breath for about 3 weeks.

A collection of pains and aches- While my legs adapted magnificently and were barely sore, other parts of my legs and body were in some pain through the whole process.

Around the beginning of June I started to have a nagging pain on the side of my hip. I changed my running sneakers and that helped for about a month, then it came back mid-July. There were a couple of nights that I couldn’t sleep because of the pain on my hip. I started to do a lot more hip stretches after my runs, that alleviated a lot of the after run pain.  

Around July, I started to get a pain that felt like shin splints on my right posterior. I did the stretching, icing and the compression sleeves, but the pain was just moving around. The pain was coming from my ankle, with pressure on the Achilles heel. The pain was only during running, and after wearing an ankle brace, the pain started to slowly go away, but I have to wear the compression sleeves while running anything longer than 8 miles.

So, legs were not sore, but the rest of my body was achy for the first 2 months of long runs. Around mid-August the recovering started to go faster and I no longer had pain in my feet and or knees after long runs.

The extra work outs

Roger, my running partner and coach told me I had to add weight training to prevent injuries. So, I did about 2 weight training sessions per week. I got pretty good at doing pull ups, almost managed to do one. Still have more work to do on that.

 I had to cut back on Yoga. With work, school for my son, soccer practice and running, keeping up with Yoga got to be very difficult. I could have cut back on Zumba, but I love Zumba, and not going would only make me grouchy.

Unfortunately, after a few trial and errors, I had to cut back on 5K races and hiking. I love 5K races, and have improved my time by more than I ever thought possible. But running a 5K at the best speed by body can, followed by a Sunday Long run got to be too much for my body, and would slow down my long runs.

Long hikes became more difficult because of time mostly. And After hiking 8 miles one day, our legs were really tired for long runs. We cut back to shorter hikes. Roger especially did not enjoy doing long hikes and then long runs. What I regret most of this is that we didn’t get to go to Glenn Rickets Falls yet.

We were supposed to add biking to our training, that didn’t quite work out.

We are as ready as we could possibly be. Roger tells me that my Half marathon should be below 2 hours, but I know myself better, and know that I will end up somewhere around 2 hours and 10 minutes. I know the excitement and rush of the run will carry me through the pain and fatigue, but also know that the race will be hard. Here we go!