Nice 12 Mile Run Saturday Morning

Sophorn and I did an easy 12 miles Saturday morning in Oaks with the crew. I am really loving the tree coverage that swallows up the path. It's awesome being shaded from the sun in summer. Doing the Kelly Drive loop just provides no protection from the heat.

We were only scheduled for 9 but felt the need to make up for our lame last couple of weeks. It was tied for the third longest run of our lives and was by far the easiest. Because she was feverish on Thursday night and I was worried about my tingly right big toe, we actually set a pace for our run and didn't commit to doing 12 when we started. It was in our minds to do an extra 3 but we weren't going to push it. And we were gonna do the first 3 miles at 10:30 and do a "wait and see" for what to do after.

This is a huge deal for me 'cause I never set a pace and when Tom and Aaron fly past us at an 8:30 pace, I get a twinge of ego and want to chase them. But the set pace helped us out and we just chilled through the run. Phorn felt ok and my toes didn't get real tingly.

The toe thing is a huge deal to me and makes me neurotic on account of how it's on the mashed up ankle, and I'm not planning on losing all feeling in lower extremities just to run a marathon. I actually have a friend who's idea of training for the ten mile Broad Street Run was to run a mile a week before the race. He's in the bind two years after bombing down Broad Street of loosing feeling in his legs if he stands for more than a half hour. There's a medical term for what happened but I can't remember, and I definitely don't want to repeat that mistake.

But my toes are cool. I've been trying to be mindful of my step and feel like I've been landing on my big toe before the others. And that might have been causing the issue. So I've been trying to make sure I give all my little piggies a chance and land on them all at once. And I guess it's been working because it wasn't anywhere near as bad as it was two weeks ago.

On a side note, Renee gave a seminar about core management and it reminded me about this thing that Johnny King Marino talked about during a seminar about a month ago on injuries. He said that we evolved so that our natural resting posture is to squat, all the while activating our core. And that we weaken our core muscles when we sit in a chair and allow it to prop us up by sitting back or by hunching forward. And that sounded good to me so I looked up those core stability chair balls on amazon.

I sit at computer 8 hours a day 5 days a week and I keep finding myself hunched over and totally bailing on proper posture. I asked Renee her opinion and she said the biggest issue she saw was that my boss might laugh at me, and that's fine with me so I might order one and see how it goes.

So game on. 15 miles is in sight for next week. This is gonna be awesome!

My name is Jim and my wife and I are training for our first marathon. Here's all my training posts to date.