It looks as if I’m falling victim to the overly cliche never-ending injury cycle. Every time I get a glimpse of some positivity with my IT band, I do exactly what I would be doing if I were truly healthy, which is, run as much as I possibly can until something hurts, the sun sets, or I’m too tired to keep running. This obviously is NOT the way to recover from an over-use injury (this is where you cue in a quote from my mother saying that one should not cure overtraining by overtraining.)

After having a really encouraging week in the Pine Tree State without any hints of needing to slow down, I ran the River to Sea relay with the Highlands Hashers. Whilst the R2C jaunt only totaled a pedestrian 12.6 Miles, of entirely flat terrain, in 2 legs, on road… cranking it out at ~7:15 pace proved just a little too much for my knee, as well as my calves (which, after a week, are finally feeling normal again). So, after limping around for a few days, having 2 really shitty runs, I decided that it would be a brilliant idea to run with Dave on Friday morning to check out the course for the Wildcat Ridge Romp. As you could expect, this only re-aggravated my knee, and wiped me out pretty well.  (Yes Dave, you kicked my ass on this one)

So what does this mean in the broad scheme of things? I really need to focus my energy on trying to run pain-free for a bit right now, especially with autumn (my favorite running season) right around the corner, and some pretty lofty (albeit unspoken) goals for next year. So for the time being, I’m going to pretend that racing is non-existent, and concentrate on simply enjoying my runs, pursuing the terrain, and courses that I really want to run on. So hopefully if I stop dangling the idea of racing in the near future in front of myself, I can do a better job of increasing my mileage in a prudent way, instead of the reckless mileage spikes I’ve been having lately.

As for how I’m feeling about all of this… maybe some graphs can make it easier:

My fitness level since getting hurt:

 Here’s how I feel about myself, and my eating habits:

 And how my mileage effects my life: