Monkey Feet

I'm feeling a little lost this morning. It's the first day without a D-Blog week prompt to guide my thoughts. I miss the solidarity that I felt last when I read blog after blog written by people who get it. They might not be people just like me but they get it. My world kept expanding - getting bigger and bigger as I discovered more and more people. And now they're gone.

Well, they're not really gone.

But we've lost that tie that held us all together last week.

We've all gone back to our lives and no longer have daily blog topics to connect us.

Such is life.

That being said, I've written about diabetes for a week straight. Let's focus on running for a bit shall we?

We are six weeks out from the start of marathon training. The goals I set for myself between now and then were:

- to build up to running four days per week in May and then up to five days per week by the end of June.

- to start walking and then running in my Vibrams so that I could eventually use them to run my two 30 minute recovery runs.

- to take care of any nagging aches & pains so that I can start the training in good shape.

So far I have been able to run four days a week - but just barely. My mileage is pretty much the same as it was when I was only running 3 days but my shins, calves and feet are definitely feeling it. So much so that I am beginning to doubt my ability to run 5 days per week. I have Geoff (my chiropractor) and Janice (my massage therapist) working on me so perhaps it's just an issue of adjusting (she says hopefully...)

I have been walking around in my Vibrams and even took them on a trip to the grocery store. I expected a few strangers to stop me to ask why I was wearing green monkey feet. I actually imagined myself in a crazy commercial where I was walking to the store entrance as cars crashed into each other, people walked into poles and little children ran away crying from the crazy lady with the green feet. Instead, I heard not a peep from anyone. Not one double take, gasp or cry of fear...that is until I was heading to my car and heard my name being called from across the parking lot. "Céline? What the hell are you wearing on your feet??" 

And we all know how much I love attention...

I am feeling more and more like I will never be an injury-free runner.  Most of the time, I am ok with that.  Knowing that injury lies just around the next corner, I try harder to keep on top of stretching, icing and taking good care of my legs.  I do have a lot of wonderful runs where nothing hurts and I'm surprised how fast the kilometres fly by.  But typically there is always some sort of issue going on below my knees.  I'm still holding out hope that learning how to run properly in the Vibrams will help alleviate some of that.  We shall see.  If anyone out there has tips for learning the proper technique, send them my way.  I'm reading a lot on line but it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense until I try. My goal is a ten minute run up and down my street this week.

If you see a newscast about some strange female sasquatch running by Ridley College - don't worry. That's just me and my monkey feet out on the town.