Feel the Burn

I’m about 3 weeks away from my half marathon, the Disneyland Half Marathon.  I’m sort of afraid I won’t be sufficiently prepared, because I’ve been struggling with workout consistency all summer.  I know I’ll make it through, I just think it’ll get ugly at the end, is all.

I had high hopes when I first started preparing for this race.  I had a kickass workout plan in place, and then my IT band injury flared up.  My physio told me not to run, so I stopped, but then I moved for my summer job and got a new physio, and she got me running again, for which I am so grateful.

This Sunday I have a 16k run in my schedule.  Back when I first started seeing my physio here in Regina (where I’m living for the summer), I was having trouble making it past 3k without some knee pain.  Last Sunday, during a 14k run, I had some mild pain around the 12k mark, so I walked the last couple of km’s.  I hadn’t really thought much of it until I met with my physio today, but she pointed out how much longer I can run without pain now.  I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but am glad that the hip strengthening and foam rolling I’ve been doing are paying off.  My physio expects that I’ll continue to improve as long as I keep working on my hip and core strength.

Tonight I did a workout that my exercise physiologist friend designed for me.  It was mostly legs and some core, and boy are my legs tired and shaky now!  There were lots of lunges and lots of one-legged exercises, which will help with the hip/core strengthening.  Let me tell you, though, that when you follow Bulgarian split squats up with split squat jumps and then forward-to-reverse lunges, there’s a whole lotta burnin’ going on in the quads.  It was good in that “feel the burn” kind of way.

Tomorrow, I had originally planned to do hill repeats, but because my IT band was feeling very irritated after 14k Sunday and then 8k Monday, I didn’t run intervals Tuesday.  So instead of hills tomorrow, I’m running my intervals.  Here’s hoping there’s no thunderstorm going on after work.

What exercise do you have a love/hate relationship with?  For me, it’s the lunge and its variations.  Tough, but effective.  I have the same type of relationship with running, too…