I RAN 4 MILES

I woke up to a fresh blanket of snow. It started last night and it is still falling at3pm this afternoon as I'm typing this. Most of the overnight snow was that heavy slushy stuff you use in a Slurpee, but I wouldn't eat it! hee hee, now it's fluffy and white and cold. Brrrrr...I hate snow and cold!

OK! after my morning coffee I went to the gym and did a set of weights while waiting for the treadmill. I'm telling you my knees were aching this morning. I finally got on the treadmill and started up with a 3.5mile/hr walk to warm up, hoping my knees would loosen up. No luck, they were stiff and hurting, so I hit the interval butting to get the mill going to my run speed.( I always set the treadmill up to do intervals with the low speed at 3.5m/hr and the run speed to 6m/hr that way I can toggle up the speed more if I'm feeling good.) As soon as the speed hit 6m/hr my knees were screaming so I toggled back to 5.5m/hr and ran with that a while. My knees where hurting like someone was sticking them with pins and after about a 1/2 mile they started to loosen up, but still hurting, but not enough not to HTFU and continue on. I then I hit the interval button to come back down to 3.5 m/hr or my walking speed for a minute to take some stress of my knees. I then hit the interval button again to take me back up to 6m/hr but I toggle it up to 6.5m/hr and kept it there for my anticipated 5km or 3.2mile run. I was feeling good at this point since my knees loosened up, but as the distance went on they were hurting more and more. Well by mile 2.6 I was saying to myself, ... " no! I Have To Keep It Going!!" .... which I did with my inner self, barring down and using my mind to keep it going. I know, I know, it the first rule in training, that if it hurts don't do it!?!? but I come from an old school attitude of .."no pain..no gain" and at this point I need to get my running going if I'm going to be able to make any effort of finishing Ironman LP.....

Your probably saying? "what about your foot? how is it holding up all this time while you are running through the pain of your knees?.....Well let me tell you! my knee pain was only half the pain going on, on my run, My left foot ( the hurt one ) was feeling stable with some pain and tightness, the orthotics overall are doing the trick, but for now I can't run longer then what I did today, and as soon as I get off my feet the pain stops in my foot. Now my other foot (the right one) I having more trouble with it then the left foot now with the orthotics? and it was aching the whole time I was running. When I take off my right orthotic, my pain stops and my foot doesn't hurt. WTF? I'm going to have to as my doc about that when I see him next month.

Back to my running on the treadmill.....29minutes I ran my first full 5km under 30min since I started back running since I can remember! Whoo Hoo!

Mind you my foot injury/tear has been on going since October 2006 and I haven't been doing any long steady running since then. Then I went on to finish with some speed intervals running 7.5m/hr holding it for 3 min and back down to walking until I finished with just over 4 miles in total treadmill miles.

I do have the fitness to go on longer as I've been swimming allot and biking, so the main thing here for me to get my run going is to basically slowly increase my distance over time and hope my aches and pains go away.

Remember yesterday I said I tweaked my knee somehow?....I figured out how, and why my knees were hurting today for the same reason? after all my running I was doing some walking on the incline, and BINGO! there it was! the pain was from doing walking on the incline, they were just over worked and stressed from the other day on the treadmill...Soooo, I figure after a few more session on the mill as my knees get used to the incline work and strengthen up I will be ride of my knee pain. So I hold true to my..." NO Pain No gain"... mentality.

I then went down for a 500m cool down swim in the pool.

Good work out day.