Monday, November 30, 2009

Injury break.

It’s been awhile…

The duathalon was a major success for me, I ran really fast without using much energy and rode pretty strong without even falling. The ride was kinda stressful because I was checking over my shoulder the whole time for the mountains bikers to come flying by me. Turns out I built a pretty nice lead in the run because I never saw them.
The best way I could think of cooling down was to go run a moderately paced 2.5 hours with Jacob Rydman, the fellow who dominated me at the Sizzler Relay. One rattlesnake encounter, a couple wrong turns, a sweet 15 minute barefoot cool down, and suddenly it was getting dark and I was done.

The next couple of runs saw me getting carried away with the joys of running fast, as I got after it pretty hard with the 400s and mile repeats. Naturally I bit off more than I should have, and after a couple of hard runs and really fun mountain bike rides on my newly converted singlespeed, I decided to pay attention to that knee pain I had been ignoring since before the duathalon. Today is the official end of two weeks off of running and riding entirely since I have patellar tendinitis and was recommended to take a short break. Cycling was out because I have a single speed MTB and a 2 speed road bike, neither of which is exactly easy on my knees.
I happily spent my time off driving all over the country, first to Yellowstone to "chase" wolves, even though I spent most of my time viewing wildlife through high powered scopes, my mom and I were lucky enough to catch sight of a wolf wandering around in plain visibility when we were on a hike along the Lamar River. After getting back into California I headed down to the XC State meet and watched some of my buddies run some pretty good times. It was my first experience at a major cross country meet and outside of the pathetically short race distances (I only say this because I am too slow to be competitive), it seemed like a lot of fun and something I wish I had taken advantage of back in the day.
I am feeling good about the future though as I had a nice easy spin on the 2 speed tonight and rode long enough that I was warm but never hit the pain that had been coming in the first 5-20 minutes. Looking forward to getting an easy run in one of the next two days and then get back to the LONG runs, but maybe back off a bit on the speed and biking business.

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