Weekend action and an anniversary of sorts

It has officially been 4 years since I started running. I ran a bit of track in high school, but was not consistent about training and then had a number of years where I did pretty much nothing.

For years I had talked about doing the Sun Run, a local 10K that last year had close to 60,000 registrants. It is a big deal in the city and every year thousands of people attend the associated running clinics or follow along with the Learn to Run or Run Faster programs that are on the web and printed in the local newspaper. So after years of saying I would do it, and then not, in 2005 I decided I would follow the online training program. I completed the program and ran the race that April.

Of course I continued to push myself and over the next few years was pretty consistently injured or just returning from injury. I have been back to running since April of last year after an almost 6 month layoff due to a calf injury and this has probably been my longest uninjured stretch. I attribute this to a few things. First, I have found a great group of sport chiro/physio people etc. that helped me start back to running and help me if I feel any niggles coming on, second, the addition of more biking and swimming, and third, I really feel I know my body better now. I think this is the first time I have been smart about training and about increasing my mileage.

You may have noticed I have not talked at all about goal races. That is because I have purposely decided not to have any. I have injured myself leading up to my last few goal races which were never run, and this time want to build a base that allows me to race, but at least at this point, not focus everything on one day and one race and just continue to enjoy running, riding, swimming and in general being active while gaining fitness.

This years Sun Run requires a whole other post and I will get to that soon.

As for this weekends action, although I wasn't feeling well I still managed to get some training in without pushing myself too much.

Saturday - 60 mins on the trainer
Sunday - 65 min easy run (mix of trails and sidewalk) on a perfect running day and 40 mins swim, with mainly drills on the advice of a very nice lifeguard.