Back to training

I went out this morning for my scheduled 5 mile run. It started well. It was 60 degrees at 6am, which was a nice change. It was raining, but I don't mind running in the rain too much. About a mile in, I was doing an 8:35-mile and I felt good. Then I started to feel a little nagging pain in my knee. Pretty much all of the muscles in my legs are sore from the 18-mile run on Saturday and the yoga I did yesterday. My abs are killing me from yoga, but that means it was working. However, because I was tentative about my knee, and a little annoyed, I slowed down a bit. It didn't feel bad or worse than it's felt before. I was just used to about 24 hours of no pain at all, so I was annoyed that I felt anything. I was wearing my knee brace. At about mile 4, I had to stop twice to stretch out and kind of "pop" my knee back into place. As the doctor explained yesterday, the IT band gets moved out of its correct place on your knee, and that's why you feel pain in that spot. I found that if I just moved it back a little, the pain subsided. And when I got home, I walked down the stairs without my knee brace on, and I had no pain. I could not have done that last week, so I see that as a good sign. I'm wearing this brace all of the time, just in case. It ruined my plan to wear a skirt today, but that's alright.

I wound up finishing the 5 miles at an average of 9:35-min/mile. That's slower than I've been on short runs in a long time, but that's ok. Every part of me kind of hurts now, abs, shoulders, arms, quads, etc. I'm supposed to run 4 miles tomorrow. This is the last week with 3 training runs, and I already skipped one, so I'm going to go for the 4 tomorrow morning. I'll rest on Friday and not work out at all, and then we have 9 miles on Saturday morning. I'll see how everything feels during the 4 miler tomorrow, and if I have to stop, I'll stop. It's so hard to force myself to rest, but I have to do it. One month until race day!