the running gods giveth...

and they taketh away.

if saturday was my most fun, enjoyable run, tonight's was definitely the polar opposite of that.

today's assignment was to run 3 miles "comfortably hard". not a sprint, because obviously that is not going to happen. this is a test of sorts. we all recorded our time, and in the next few weeks we'll have lovely hill training, then we'll do the test again. the point is to show how much we've improved over those 6ish weeks of hill-torture, uh i mean training.

the first stupid thing i did was have salad for lunch. no fuel in there! the second stupid thing i did was not have a carby-snack. duh! and finally, i had my achy hip to deal with, which tended to get cranky when encountering lots of pounding.

we warmed up by heading to the bottom of the big hill in the park where we would start the race...by running back up that damn hill. i usually end my runs on that thing, and given that we were running hard, i predicted starting by going up that hill would most certainly be difficult.

and it was. i thought i was going moderately fast, but no...it was too fast. when i finished the hill, i could feel my hip pain settling in for a good visit, i was winded as hell and i developed a side stitch under the right set of my ribs towards my back. uuuug. i'll swallow my pride and say that i pretty much felt terrible and still had 2 miles to go.

because my hip was hurting, i didn't push to much, but i didn't want to completely throw the test and have my suffering be in vain so i just tried to be smart. i didn't pound down the hills too fast. i tried to use my arms to keep going. generally, i just looked at the ground a little ahead of where i was going so i wouldn't run into anything but also so that i wasn't totally conscious over how far i had to go.

we completed our run and my time was 30:28. i know i could be faster if my hip hadn't been acting up...and i shouldn't have gone so fast up the hill. i was very grumbly as we waited for the rest of the team to finish up and then took a nice easy cool-down run back to our meeting spot at the entrance of the park. even getting up there my hip was wincy, and i decided it was time to ask coach jim what he thought.

i told him my theory that my suffering was my IT band, he said it could be a number of things, suggesting a few stretches, icing, and some PT. we decided i would take a little running break until saturday and see how it was then. if it wasn't any better, he suggested seeing a sports doctor just to make sure there's nothing really wrong.

so...yeah. i've got plenty of time to train so i'm not freaking out yet, but this week will be mostly cross-training until we see if things are indeed, a.o.k.

on a brighter note - fundraising began last night and in one day i've already raised over $700 bucks. still a bit to go to $10k, but its a very solid start. and of course, with those donations, comes the priceless kinda support from my friends in the form of encouragement and kind words. so i'm going to focus on that tonight, and think positive about my little hip. i think it's all going to turn out okay.

today's mileage: 5.9
time run: n/a
season mileage to date: 98.4