First Failure + First Injury = Finishing Week Six

Well, things couldn't go smoothly forever. Today was my first failed run. I managed to fail twice, too!

First I should set the scene... I wanted to run yesterday because jumping from two 10-minute runs to a full 25 minute run seemed crazy and I wanted to do this with only one day between. However, I had an interview for a teaching fellows thingy from 8:30 am to 3:00 pm and I was exhausted after. I took a nap and then got some tacos and beer. I then went out, drank like a sailor, smoked 2.5 cigarettes and sang karaoke. I believe I fell asleep on my couch around 6 a.m.

So today, despite sleeping until 3, I was kind of hurting. I'm not sure I drank enough water to make up for my hungover dehydration and I was a little headachy. I had to delay my run by a half hour or so because I discovered that my Zune was dead, too. So I was crabby as well.

I left the house with a severe lack of confidence, visited the park with hopes of running there, found that the snow had melted and refrozen into dangerously bumpy ice, and continued on across the park to the sidewalks I've been running on. Most of them are clear but there are a few areas that are just a sheet of ice, so I was wearing my yak trax. About five minutes into the run, another runner was coming at me from the opposite direction and I was checking her out rather than looking at the situation near my feet; my yak trax caught on some irregularity in the sidewalk (there was no ice there) and I completely wiped out. I landed on my left knee and my right hand; luckily my knee was covered by thick fleecy sweatpants and my hand was covered by a thick glove. Nothing hurt too badly so I got up, assured the other runner that I was fine, and continued on. My knee hurt, but I figured it was just bruised.

So that was my first interruption. My second was just about being a baby. I still have trouble regulating my breathing, perhaps due in part to the occasional cigarette, but also because my nose gets stuffy in the cold and my throat gets phlegmy and no matter how much I spit and blow my nose, this hinders me. Plus, I developed a pretty mean headache during this run, possibly due to dehydration. So about 16 minutes in, I had to switch to walking. I walked for about two minutes and somehow motivated myself to begin running again. I tacked on an extra minute at the end (day one of this week lasts 26 minutes so I was easily able to measure this).

The Running Into Shape website indicates that we should be covering approximately 2.5 miles in 25 minutes. With the fall and the 2 minute walk break, I still made about 2.3 miles in 25 minutes, so that's pretty good. Additionally, this coming week is composed of three 25 minute runs. So I'm not going to repeat anything and I pretty much hope to work up to running for 25 minutes straight by the end of the week. I really hope the park clears up soon because I'd like to be able to run in circles and let my mind wander more, plus I'm not a huge fan of the people I encounter on the street.

By the way, I got home to find that my knee was bloody and swollen. It has continued to swell a bit; I now have a rather large bump that I'll be icing. When I told my sister about my knee, she reminded me that I totally fucked up my knee last January, as well. I was running up an escalator after getting up the el and I tripped on my heavy winter boot. My knee slammed into the spiky edge of an escalator stair and was a bloody mess. I think it was the same knee; apparently this is an annual thing. Just like last year, I took pictures. Here they are: