Slowly Getting Faster

I was sick of being injured tonight so after 20 minutes of biking on the spin bike in my garage I decided to just go for a couple mile jog and see how I felt.  It's my right leg that is injured, for some reason it is always my right leg, and initially it was tight near the ankle on the outside of the calf. That tightness mostly went away after about a half mile and then I just focused on keeping my pace slow and making sure my feet landed in proper form.

I agitated my planter facia last saturday and it has hurt all week as well.  each day over the past couple of days it has progressively felt better, and tonight it didn't hurt at all. I have noticed that my feet muscles are a bit more sore tonight than usual though.  I think it is the result of basically not running since December 22. I hope that if I take it east the next couple of days, slowly work my way back into the swing of things, I they will wake up again.  The problem with these zero drop shoes is that there is no forgiveness.  If I push too hard I will end up injured again.  So slow and steady will have to be the pace for the next few weeks.  

I went again this morning.  My leg felt pretty good.  I'm hoping that maybe later today my leg will loosen up even more and I can get back out for another couple miles. It feels really good to be running again.  

AP: 9:34  Vert: 366' 

Another 3 this afternoon.  I don't know if I should have gone again but I really wanted to and I ended up feeling good the whole time.  I did city creek (the road) this afternoon and despite the first half being uphill I was still 3 minutes faster than I was this morning. I'm going to keep taking it slow (pace wise and miles in a single run) until I'm sure I'm better. Going to try and get 5ish in tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. 

AP: 8:38  Vert: 284' 

I decided to do some off road.  I really wanted to hit either the BST that dorsimius talked about the other day or do a flag rock run.  I did neither because I realize I am still not 100% and didn't want to hurt myself again. Instead I took a single track trail up to the fire break from my house and then cut across the firebreak to Farmington canyon.  At the canyon I decide to run up the asphalt to the bridge, which turned into a run up ice and snow to the bridge. I only fell once, on black ice. Then I cut back across the firebreak, back down the single track trail, down to 300 east, across and up the steep hill on state street. My leg felt good throughout, which I am very happy about. 

 I wanted to run off road today for a couple of reasons: 1) because I haven't been able to for more than a month and I have been jonesing for the opportunity; and 2) because I recently acquired Altra Lone Peaks and I wanted to take them for a test drive. I like them a lot better than my old cascadias but I can see that they don't have a lot of forgiveness for poor form.  At one point I let my heal hit the ground (first I think) and it hit a rock.  I'm sure I did the same thing in the cascadias, but because those shoes have much more padding in the heal than the Lone Peaks I have never noticed before. I think that the requirement to maintain good form is a benefit of these shoes, but it is going to take some careful running while I get used to zero-drop on the off roads.  

AP: 11:11, Vert 934' 

I tried to go out again, but I probably shouldn't have.  My intention was to do an easy 3 but I stopped at 2.41 because I could feel my foot starting to have issues. I guess the bright side is that I stopped rather than hurt myself again.  My calves have been pretty stiff since this mornings run so they probably just needed to be rested.  Well, they get the rest of the night, if not the rest of the weekend.

AP: 9:15,  Vert: 116'